Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, Ovum IT

The recent VMware Forum 2013 in London provided a platform for VMware EMEA chief technologist, Joe Baguley, to reveal how VMware is addressing the challenges of transforming IT to an as-a-service paradigm. This transformation is based on three key pillars.

First, it is about making the entire data center more agile, and the software-defined data center (SDDC) is the vehicle that VMware sees as being a major disruptive technology to enable the delivery of IT in this way. Second, it is about open standards to support the hybrid cloud. Finally, it is about the way in which customers access these services is changing.

For VMware this signals a shift from a virtual desktop policy to a multi-device strategy that supports the concept of enablement, not control. Ovum believes that this shift does not represent a radical rebirth for VMware, but instead is the result …