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If virtualization – which is all about enabling the running of multiple applications and operating systems on a single server or PC – is the one of the hot technologies to watch for in 2007, then VMware President Diane Greene may have the best seat in the house.
For, as per IDC estimates, 2.3 million virtual servers, which are, in a sense, akin to pots that can cook several courses at once on the same burner were deployed in 2006, as against 7.7 million physical servers in the same year. A recent survey by agency showed that 76 percent of companies are adopting or planning to adopt x86 virtualization in the next 12 months. Also, Forrester notes that 46 percent of the Global 2000 are either already using or will pilot virtualization within the same period.
All these developments make this an exciting time for Greene, who along with her husband and three other engineers, founded VMware in 1998 as a company that could take the concept of virtualization and develop the technology for a much wider audience.
Virtualization as a practical way to manage data center assets has been in use since the late 1960s, when IBM offered a version of the technology for its legacy mainframe systems.
What VMware did, however, is take the technology and deliver it to the mainstream, first for desktops and then later for x86 servers. Now in its ninth year, VMware, which is owned by EMC, dominates the virtualization field and had a record year in 2006, including an 83 percent increase in revenue over the previous year.
VMware announced earlier this year that it would sell 10 percent of the company in an initial public offering, which means that its customers will likely see more in the way of virtualization innovation in the coming years.
In an interview, Greene, who placed tenth on Ziff Davis Media's Top 100 Most Influential People in IT list, said that the next great wave of virtualization innovation will help bring the technology out of the data center by combining security and manageability.
"I think there is a real desire out there now to host desktops on a server," said Greene, who holds degrees from MIT, the University of Vermont and the University of California at Berkeley. "I think you're going to see the ability to run more desktops on servers and companies investing more in thin clients. This is going to allow companies to have PCs with instant restart, no booting and have a lot more control over the management of the data."
Another key innovation is creating a mobile virtual environment. Greene's company has already starting addressing some of those issues with the beta release of ACE (assured computing environment) 2 software. The beta offers new security features for virtual environments on laptops, such as the ability for IT administrators to utilize or lock down USB ports within these virtual environments. Within the data center, Greene said the company is working on perfecting the migration of virtual environments from one machine to another without interruption.
The efforts have already started showing rich dividends. While Vmware’s 200 Vmware’s revenue increased by 83 percent year-over-year to $709 million; the revenues of the last quarter of 2006 witnessed a 101 percent year-over-year growth to touch $232 million.
Outside of traditional virtualization vendors, Greene said she has been impressed with the offerings from both Intel and its rival, Advanced Micro Devices, and what the two companies have done to add hardware support for CPU memory and I/O virtualization. Greene has also been impressed with the innovations coming from Web 2.0 companies, such as Google, Amazon and eBay.
As for the future of VMware, Greene remains optimistic that the company will not only grow, but thrive. After all, 75 percent of VMware customers plan to upgrade their existing VMware environments to VMware Infrastructure 3 by mid 2007, with most of its customers expecting to virtualize at least 50 percent of their IT infrastructure within three years.
"The demand for computing will not decline," Greene said. "VMware is on 5 percent of the servers out there and there are a lot of places for us to go with virtualization and we have a very rich road map."
VMware in INDIA
VMware's mission is to transform industry standard server and desktop computing through virtualization.
VMware India was established in 2004 with offices in the IT hub city of Bangalore.
The India Development Center currently is experiencing very high growth and is looking for world class
engineers and computer scientists. Join one of the fastest growing software companies to transform the IT landscape.
Charter: The India Development Center will own own one or more product lines where the local management and
technical leadership team will work with Product Management to define complete products and own
the delivery of these products. The initial R&D projects that will be developed out of the India Development Center
will revolve around ESX Storage Platform and Virtual Infrastructure Solutions.
Examples of VI Solutions include VMware VirtualCenter, VMware Converter, VMware Security Solutions,
Storage Management and Disaster Recovery.
