VMworld 2009: VMware! Shutting HP out, is it worth the risk?
By Tarry Singh at 27 June, 2009, 5:07 am
Update 2 28th June 2009: After the whole twitter world getting a bit fired up by this post I just want to say one thing of all the possible [and unrealistic, according to some, circumstances] that the following are the observations I can make now:
1. Cisco doing what it should be doing: Cisco is and should push as harder as it can to get everywhere.
2.HP will respond: We will be expecting a HP response soon enough. It could be a a come back scenario which Allan predicts [back in Feb '09], although I personally think that HP will [as it did with it's Alcatel announcement] make some bigger annoucements soon.
3. Economy is really really bad: For now there is a painful malaise and hopefully by 2010 Q1 it might get a bit better. Final thoughts: Remember folks! IT’S ALL ABOUT THE CUSTOMERS! They ought to listen to the new noises and get enticed by the new boxes and throw the clunkers into the bin. People [read: customers] are not spending and they are not willing to spend anytime soon. I listen to the corporate customers on a daily basis and we really have a thing to worry about here, my friends. Boxes that were bought this year/last year will stay in production for atleast 4 years and many are even putting them on 6 years refresh cycles to justify costs while asking yearly budget. Money is really not coming that easy thsi time.
VMware might be in a better position to really talk to those customers [paying] and make it a private event [despite all the furor in the blogospehere] to put its focus where the money is. New customers and others may be fun to talk to but they just want to make sure that the paying and loyal customer’s who will end up in SF will also get excited about vSphere on UCS [or any other hardware for that matter].
My advice to vendors/markets: Vendors need true versatilists who are great salesmen and tremendously capable of doing quickfire installations/setups of multiple hypervisors at one go. Cisco is poaching good people for quite a while, I know many guys from VMW have moved over and truly hope that they get the freedom and free hands to really display their strenghts within their trusted customer circles. Especially with the cloud, you will really need great sales staff. don’t expect the sales to just happen because you built some cool boxes, it’ll take a lot more than that.
Update 1
This sort of groupism and camp-forming, if we ought to believe those VAR guys, is only going to drive the competition forward. If HP is really being shut out then we are going to see some serious consequences, as I have already predicted in the past. Think of the following scenarios:
- HP ties a solid deal with Juniper and Vyatta to fuel its enterprise and open source strategy shutting Cisco [explicitly] out.
- HP buys another vendor from another vertical, say system Integrator such as Accenture.
- HP merges with Microsoft [as it has been predicted before].
- Tying strongly with Oracle [exadat is one solid terrain] and thus pushing EMC fully out of the Oracle’s customer eco-system - Thinking that VMware is the man behind this allB.S, its ALL about storage and EMC could have a lot to lose.
- Oracle goes ahead and ties a deal with Microsoft to fully support its VDI and Azure - we don’t know how yet but imagine if that’s done.
- Oracle and IBM just waits to feed on the carcass and keep acquiring new customers
- Someone will buy Citrix and Redhat in this heated madness and frenzy - looks sort of not smart [never make a decision on an empty stomach] but you never know
- Dell continues to win - Competition will spread the “vendor lock-in mantra” - Cisco/VMW/EMC while competition keeps buying solution from alternative storage vendors, they will continue to buy VMware [for now].
- Hyper-V is coming on stronger than you can imagine [from what I've seen and heard, many customers are asking for comparison]. Price is a big issue.
- External parties such as Google and Amazon will eventually let this whole field get leveled. Somehow they’ll just stay out of this ring fight.
Anyways it’s a hot market and lot of bloodbath and aggresive M&A will accelerate the market consolidation as the market. Cosnumer is really getting that proverbial throne as they get more and more in commanding position to purchase stuff from the clouds.
Update1: to be fair to Cisco, I’d do everything everywhere to push the UCS boxes, if I was the UCS guy at Cisco. Cisco needs VMware, Citrix and just about everyone to run their stuff on their boxes and it’ll [it should!] do everything to get there.
One large Cisco and Hewlett-Packard VAR said that HP has been “shut out of VMworld.”
That VAR, who asked to remain anonymous, said instead of leading with HP servers in the VMworld data center, the show will rely on several Cisco UCS servers.
“Cisco is creating a market and creating a buzz,” that VAR said, adding that Cisco has been aggressive in marketing and pushing UCS, despite only selling it through 20 or so partners currently and only planning to ship about 200 UCS systems by the end of 2009.
The solution provider added that UCS provides price-performance offering on par with HP’s offerings and has “taken a great leap forward to increase ROI and cut TCO” with UCS.
Another Cisco solution provider said that the vendor is making a big push with UCS, and part of that push is getting in front of VMware customers by being the server provider to the VMworld conference.
“Cisco is making an extremely aggressive play to seed their server infrastructure into existing accounts,” the solution provider said. “With Cisco’s marketing power and financing, they will be successful. But it’s not going into production environments yet. Like VMware in the beginning, customers are trying it for test and development environments.”
HP did not respond to questions about its presense at VMworld
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Interesting supastition Tarry, A long term posibility but not as the result of HP being pushed out. the fact is UCS is big this year. and marketing money counts. HP will be there. they are a platinum sponser as far as I am aware.
and the Cisco to buy EMC rumour has been diong the round since mid 2005, now I know that there is no smoke without fire, but surely this fire has burnt all the fuel available to it.
But rumours do make the world go round, and it is common knowledge that HP has been a serious lover of Microsoft for many years so that may be an outside posibility. if that one deal came off, the frenzy for aquisitions would be enormous,
Agreed but problem here remains this:
- Time is something we don’t have
- Economy is so bad, a good quarter and some bad blood is better than a bad quater and very upset shareholders
- When you make a server that redefines everything, you suddenly will get a lot of customer love as they’ll see a lot of savings and something tangible to hold one to, imagine 1 server that does everything! Cisco stands a great chance to grab larger chunks of market than analysts would expect.
I personally like the aggression that Cisco is displaying, it should continue to be persistent. They are entering a very crowded market and they HAVE to make noise and they HAVE to enter into customer boundaries.