VMware’s (VMW) recent hybrid cloud announcement was both expected and yet provocative. It falls into a pattern of successful moves made in virtualization security and networking as the company to grow its addressable market by virtualizing servers and delivering increased IT agility, efficiency and economy. Yet the bold move is not without risk.
In 2009 I talked about how VMware, through acquisitions and engineering, entered the security space despite a robust virtualization security ecosystem (see VMware Crosses the Rubicon – March 2009). VMware was threatened then by the new security challenges being brought into the production data center by virtualization and the inability of its partners to move fast enough to address them.