I met with VMWare this week. They own ninety-something percent of the virtualization market. They've now purchased SpringSource. SpringSource is all about simplifying Java development for the enterprise. We use VMWare virtualization heavily and our Java stack is based on SpringSource's.
Is this acquisition a good thing?
It depends. On one hand, it's an interesting opportunity to more seamlessly integrate virtualization into the development desktop. A developer should be able to use whichever desktop they choose and replicate the production environment as much as possible locally. Then a push of a button should send a virtual machine up to the next environment (test, staging, etc.). Extend this ability to sending your virtual machine to be tested or even hosted in the cloud, either intentionally or automatically.
If VMWare wins over the mindshare of the cloud providers then this has beautiful implications for disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, peak offloading and even data center outsourcing itself.
So what could be bad? Two potential problems.
First, VMWare has more developers than Microsoft Windows had at its peak. It's a big company and getting bigger. How able will it be to avoid the bureacracy and bloat mentality that ended up hurting Microsoft and other technology companies who went through this kind of growth?
More importantly, how benevolent will VMWare be? They're basically a monopoly in the virtualization space--at least today until Microsoft catches up. If they end up owning the data centers, internal and external, it's much easier for them to call the shots.
Will we see the same behavior we have seen from Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and others? Will we be held hostage by exorbitant maintenance fees? Will "optional, but really required" add-on prices go through the roof. Will service levels decline in non-contract years?
We shall see. Might be wise to root for Xen or even Microsoft to keep up in this space.
