Key Takeaways from VMForce Announcement
Today VMware and Salesforce.com announced vmforce.com finally after several weeks of speculations on what the joint project is about. The following diagram I captured from the live webcast of the event answered the question nicely.
The event attracted about 3,500 online viewers, not to mention the audience onsite. This was a very successful event, resulted in more media coverage than anyone can read. If you missed the live webcast, you can check out the recorded one from the website.
Among all the blogs and news coverage, I think you should read the one by Steve Herrod who has done a great job in explaining the joint adventure in a big picture. His blog also has links to other bloggers.
Looking beyond the exciting keynotes and demos, I think the key takeaways from the announcement are as follows:
1. Mission: Simplify IT
The mission first appeared in a blog on SpringSource acquisition. With this in mind, all the acquisitions made by VMware starts to make great sense. It’s mentioned several times in the keynotes on this shared mission with saleforce.com. The VMForce is part of the cloud story for that mission.
2. Vision: Open PaaS
VMware’s entries into this space will focus on addressing this challenge and, with our partners, creating “Open PaaS” offerings.
One thing in particular mention here should strike you … we will wholeheartedly enable deployment of these cloud portable applications to clouds that are not based on our underlying vSphere virtualization technology. This support is a key aspect of openness and will enable a broader and more competitive ecosystem of compatible Spring PaaS offerings. And this in turn will be the reason why developers will bet on Spring-based applications for maximum flexibility. Stay tuned as you’ll see many more announcements around this very soon. [from the blog by Steve Herrod, the same for the rest]
This is a great news for the developers who can develop once and deploy anywhere without worries about vendor lock in.
3. Product Strategy: Cloud Platform for Developers
VMware is building a product portfolio for cloud platform though a series of acquisition of SpringSource, RabbitMQ.
These products, along with others that we’ll unveil in the near future, are what we refer to as “vCloud Developer Services” and “vCloud Platform Services”.
4. Business Strategy: Partnership
The VMforce collaboration is VMware’s first public implementation of Platform-as-a-Service (abbreviated as “PaaS”).
VMware’s PaaS strategy is through collaboration with others. With vmforce being the first, we can reasonably assume more to come in the future.
Ready to try vmforce.com? You can sign up the developer preview coming this fall from the website.
Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.
