VMware kicks off VMworld 2010 with the news it has bought two companies, Integrien and TriCipher, to acquire technologies to support the company's "IT-as-a-service" strategy.
VMware
CEO Paul Maritz, speaking at a post-keynote media conference, said VMware
acquired the two companies for the value of their technologies to VMware cloud
infrastructure plans, not for any significant increase to the parent company's
earnings.
The
companies include Integrien, a developer of real-time data center performance
analytics and management software, and TriCipher, a developer of cloud security
software. VMware didn't disclose the financial terms of the deal. Company
officials said both deals will close in the 2010 third quarter and won't have a
material effect on VMware financial guidelines for the year.
VMware
intends to integrate Integrien's data system performance management and
analytics technology with its vCenter management products. Steve Herrod, VMware
chief technology officer, said the Integrien technology would help the
company deliver a new level of automation and control to support
virtualized and cloud infrastructures.
TriCipher's
security technology will support multiple initiatives of VMware's cloud
infrastructure, including identity-based security, integration of hybrid clouds
and managed access to SAAS (software-as-a-service) applications from any device
at any time.
The
acquisitions were tied into the main theme of VMworld 2010's opening keynote
Aug. 31 in which VMware officials said customers are increasingly ready to move
to hybrid cloud IT infrastructures, which it defines as a combination of
customers' private clouds and public SAAS cloud systems.
Rick
Jackson, VMware chief marketing officer, said the majority of VMware customers
have passed through the first two phases in the adoption of virtualization
technology. The first phase was the virtualization of "controlled assets," the
servers, storage drives and processors in the data center. In the second phase
they learned that applications run better in a virtualized environment, because
"they are more reliable and they deliver a higher quality level of service," Jackson
said.
Customers
have learned that applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and
massive Oracle databases all run better under VMware virtualization, said
Jackson. Customers "are able to achieve high availability and put in place
disaster recovery at a fraction of the previous cost" of implementation in a
non-virtualized environment, he said.
The
third phase will be to leverage the operational flexibility provided by
virtualized data systems to implement "IT as a service," which enables IT
organizations to deliver applications and computing resources where, when and
how it is needed by customers, Jackson said. The goal of IT as a service,
Jackson said, is optimizing IT production resources for business
consumption so it can respond to evolving business needs rapidly,
efficiently and at a lower cost than the long-established methods of delivering
IT services internally.
VMware
introduced new and upgraded products to support this move to the hybrid cloud
and IT as a service. They include VMware vCloud Director, which allows IT
departments to create virtual data centers with defined subsets of computing,
network and storage resources configured for particular projects or
applications. These virtual data center services are delivered under defined
management policies with specific service level agreements and pricing.
IT
departments can offer entire catalogs of predefined virtual data center
services to enable customers, whether internal corporate departments or
external customers, to access the services through an automated self-service
process.
Furthermore,
the services can be a combination of internal secure IT resources, custom
corporate applications or SAAS applications on public cloud systems.
VMware
also introduced three new vShield security products to support cloud
infrastructure. These include vShield Edge, vShield App and vShield
Endpoint. These products virtualize security and network edge services, such as
firewalls, Virtual Private Networks and load balancing services. These virtual
security and management services are designed to free security from the
physical data center infrastructure through a flexible and programmable
interface.
VMware
vCloud Datacenter Services was developed to enable enterprises to link their
data centers to external cloud systems while preserving security and maintaining
service-quality standards. The vCloud Datacenter services supports hybrid
private-public cloud services by working with major service providers including
Verizon, Bluelock, SingTel, Colt and Terremark.
With
vCloud Datacenter Services, enterprises can move computing workloads back and
forth between internal virtualized systems to public cloud services by applying
consistent infrastructure, security and management models.
John Pallatto is eWEEK.com's Managing Editor News/West Coast. He directs eWEEK's news coverage in Silicon Valley and throughout the West Coast region. He has more than 35 years of experience as a professional journalist, which began as a report with the Hartford Courant daily newspaper in Connecticut. He was also a member of the founding staff of PC Week in March 1984. Pallatto was PC Week's West Coast bureau chief, a senior editor at Ziff Davis' Internet Computing magazine and the West Coast bureau chief at Internet World magazine.
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