Cloud Computing: VMware Killed the Past. Can It Claim the Future?
August 24, 2013
Grazed from New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.
VMware is a 15-year-old tech company with a market capitalization of $36 billion. Next week, it will host 21,000 customers in San Francisco and will start to find out if that means it is young or old. “It’s a statement of our success how quickly we’ve become mainstream,” said Pat Gelsinger, the company’s chief executive. Now, however, he says, “we’re at the crossroads.”
As what he calls “the last great company of the client-server generation,” VMware is going through much of the same transition to the world of cloud computing, big data, and mobility, that bedevils so many giants of the old tech world. Uniquely, the company has a legitimate claim to have helped destroy the software world in which it started…
VMware’s main product, virtualization software, allows one computer server to do the work of many, and for complex tasks to be shared across several machines. That disrupted the old computer server business, and helped usher in the current model of big data centers and cloud computing. But now, as other companies offer both proprietary and open source virtualization, VMware has to move on from the world it helped destroy…
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