Comments on: VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

By: randybias

randybias — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:01:42 +0000

The Amazon VPC offering is a great start. It will definitely entice enterprise customers to move additional batch processing loads. However, this is not an isolated or dedicated offering, so it is unlikely that customers will move production or workloads that require security and data privacy.

Amazon will continue to make minor inroads into the enterprise, but will never be able to make significant inroads without dramatically changing their offering.

By: BotchagalupeMarks for September 15th - 14:26 | IT Management and Cloud Blog

BotchagalupeMarks for September 15th - 14:26 | IT Management and Cloud Blog — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:15:34 +0000

[...] VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT! | Cloudscaling – More and more it’s becoming apparent that VMware and Amazon are headed for a serious collision. Amazon is eager to capture more of the enterprise business market, VMware’s bread and butter. Meanwhile, VMware is actively supporting a new crop of Amazon competitors with its recent vCloud Express release. More importantly, what perhaps neither have realized or, at least as far I can tell Amazon hasn’t realized, is that the battle isn’t ultimately about so-called ‘public’ or ‘private’ clouds[1], but about standards, de facto or otherwise. [...]

By: bmullan

bmullan — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:34:37 +0000

I think one approach AWS has made is it's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering.

Many Enterprises that may have considered buying VMware (lets not forget how expensive VMware licensing is for an Enterprise) may start to consider VPC if the compute/storage resources are in their own address space allowing the enterprise to use their existing nms etc tools for both their existing DC and any “virtual” DC components inside their AWS hosted VPC.

By: randybias

randybias — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:04:42 +0000

You are right. I stand corrected. I will update the article to say 3x the employees and 10x revenue.

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:04:02 +0000

“Amazon (AMZN), as a whole, is roughly 10x the size of VMware (VMW) in both employees and revenue. “
I am not sure how you figured this out. For your information, VMW has 6700 employees and AMZN has 18400.

7 times 10 = 70, not 18.

By: JohnTreadwayCloudBzz

JohnTreadwayCloudBzz — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:03:04 +0000

Randy – In some sense, VMware is appearing to be the open one, while their control (de facto) of the standard gives them an unfair advantage (at least perceived) over competitors who adopt it. Nobody will trust them. Nobody will trust Amazon either, for that matter. As @botchagalupe has been saying, vCloud may have a lot of operational overhead that makes it not great as a public commodity cloud underpinning, and not even that great as a private cloud.

I don't agree with your railroad analogy, however. Moving from one cloud to another requires translation, brokering or whatever, but it's not technically all that hard (CloudSwitch, RightScale, etc.). Taking a locomotive and adapting the wheels in real-time to switch track size… well, I think we'd all agree about the downside of a #FAIL scenario there! Standardization will unlock growth, but the market may well go along for many years with lots of heterogeneity. Fortunately, the enterprise is used to that complexity.

Anyway, great post.

By: JohnTreadwayCloudBzz

JohnTreadwayCloudBzz — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:55:14 +0000

Randy – am agreeing on your general concept. I think it will be even more fragmented, with a few large competing commodity clouds (such as AWS, Google, Azure each with their own unique flavors, but each with a number of extensions up the value chain) and multiple types of enterprise clouds based on workloads and other parameters (HPC, OLTP, etc.).

By: RTFM Education » Blog Archive » VMware Vs Amazon?

RTFM Education » Blog Archive » VMware Vs Amazon? — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:03:37 +0000

[...] http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/vmware-vs-amazon-round-one-fight [...]

By: James Watters

James Watters — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:01:43 +0000

Sam I think the variability of revenue is an important point here. Say Amazon has $200M in EC2 revenue (I know that's more aggressive than Randy's estimate but I've heard numbers that high often)…what would that have equated to in internal IT spending for VMwares customers? I think the number would be a multiple of 2-3x at least?

By: randybias

randybias — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:55:24 +0000

Insightful as always, Dmitriy. I agree that we're just at step one. We need not only standard APIs, but ability to make 'SLA contracts' with clouds for security, performance and similar. This was always one of @jamesurquhart's favorite topics.

I think the vCloud API is a first step towards this, though. There is nothing to stop folks from overloading or extending the vCloud API to add these capabilities.

This also showcases a good reason *for* lock-in. Meaning that, of course, clouds with the same hypervisor and same cloud architecture will facilitate application architectures that can be easily migrated between them.

So, you're right, cloud lock-in via functionality is harder to overcome, but providers will move towards a lowest common denominator. One that, if you design towards, will guarantee your application's portability. Combined with SLA contracts, lock-in will be much harder.

To be honest, while in the short term cloud lock-in is important, over the long haul I think it's a red herring. It's like thinking there will be lock-in for railroads. There can't be because they *must* interoperate in order to have value.

I'm pretty sure the market is going to make lock-in impossible in this case.