Virtualisation is not cloud computing

Virtualisation is not the key to cloud, according to one of the industry’s most well-known chief executives (CEOs).

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, listed the merits of the technology and admitted to using VMware in his own corporate data centres, but, during a Q&A session at Dreamforce 2011, he said it wasn’t cloud computing.

First off, the CEO claimed those who used it as a migration tool to the cloud had the wrong end of the stick…


"The reality is a fundamentally different philosophy," he said. "Somehow we are going to come out of the client server era and need these technologies to bring us into the cloud era, [like] we need a transitional technology [hence] we need virtual machines."

"I obviously dont believe that and I don’t believe we need more software."

Benioff referred to VMware throughout his diatribe – which is holding its own annual conference this week in Las Vegas – praising what the technology can do but insiting it was not cloud computing.

"I watched the VMware keynote this week [and] they talked about how they now have 50 per cent of the total market of servers," he said. "They have loaded their software onto 50 per cent of all servers and they are now much more efficient."

"Then they said those [servers] are now all clouds. Then is when you have got my attention."

Benioff said he thought virtualisation was great and understood why comapnies call it a private cloud, but he and his company’s vision was of multi-tennancy shared infrastructure with services over the top in the public domain.

"When you look at companies like Amazon… [we] agree on something really fundamental," he added. "If you are talking about more hardware or you are talking about more software, it is not about the cloud."

"It is not that [cloud] customers aren’t all customers of virtual machines companies, but [it is not] public cloud."

Benioff concluded by offering a tip for spotting a cloud offering over just virtualisation.

"Some of those companies are software companies," he said. "They have versions with numbers after it, that is when you know you are dealing with software."

"If you hear about versions, you know you are not in the cloud. That is why we walked away from that whole concept of the version. [With Salesforce] it is not a new version, it is a new vision of the cloud."