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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.