VMware: Enterprises Still Need Data Centers

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The enterprise data center is going to be with us for a long time, despite the growth in off-premises cloud computing, according to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. He didn’t make this assertion in his keynote address at VMworld Monday or in his press conference on Tuesday. Gelsinger’s prediction of legacy data center longevity happened after Marc Andreessen, former Netscape developer and now a venture capitalist, stated in an executive roundtable on the first day of VMworld that Silicon Valley startups shun building their own data centers.

"It’s extremely rare to see a capital expense budget in a Silicon Valley startup anymore. It consists of four laptops [and cloud computing]," Andreessen said. Gelsinger responded, "We disagree. People who say put everything into the cloud have never met a highly regulated customer…

A lot of people like Graeme [Graeme Hay, head of infrastructure architecture at Credit Swisse] have real service-level agreements, real governance, real compliance needs that can’t be easily met in the cloud." In this response, Gelsinger gave a nod to Hay as a fellow participant on a roundtable panel titled "The Data Center Is Dead. Long Live the Data Center."…

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