I started last week confused, and ended the week more confused than ever. The cloud computing industry is simply changing too quickly for me. As one industry CEO remarked to me in agreement, “the vendors are moving quickly, but the customers are moving slowly.”
The VMworld show held last week in San Francisco had an exhibition that took over the Moscone Convention Center’s full south hall. Keynotes were attended by what appeared to be about 5,000 people. It was frenetic.
But upon close inspection, the show seemed to be about vendors talking to vendors, conspiring, consolidating, and fearing what might be going on a few aisles over. There was this surface layer of customers wandering around, a secondary aspect of what seemed to be a very large industry talking to itself.
The biggest announcement came on the show’s first day when VMware said it would join the OpenStack alliance. It can’t be said at this point how this will work out. OpenStack has been criticized by some as too loosely structured, and the VMware announcement reinforces this point. On the other hand, loosey goosey means widely adopted, so maybe this announcement forbodes a future of embracing and extending open source within the enterprise a la Microsoft’s strategy to dominate the desktop a generation ago.
Later, I traveled to San Diego for the LinuxCon/CloudOpen conference. I saw Linus Torvalds himself roaming the halls, but did not hear him speak. This was an old-fashioned geekfest, with modest table-booths, lots of folks in t-shirts, and seriously technical presentations. Open-source proponents with whom I spoke uniformly described VMware as “the enemy.”
All of this is in the context of VMware selling perhaps $2 billion in software to a global IT industry of more than $4 trillion (including telco). We’ve only just begun, customers are still talking about whether to adopt cloud and thinking along now-ancient public/private/hybrid lines, while the industry is evolving like mad.