Business-Driven Architect

Energize and Save, Tod Nielsen, Chief Operating Officer, VMWare, opening keynote

Todd starts by talking about all of the government agencies VMWare works with.  The list is extensive.  One example, the CIA is virtualizing 4000 servers, saving millions in capital and energy costs.

Gartner factoid, 89% of virtualized apps run on VMWare (dated December 2008).

Early in virtualization journey, 0 - 20% virtualized, the big savings is Capex.  These projects are typically for IT owned assets, file and print, mail etc.  Next phase, is line of business applications, the concerns here shift from just capex to "speeds and feeds", business continuity, up-time.  Often, these are less critical, tier 2 and 3 applications.  Todd shares anecdote of organization where CIO was concerned that tier 2 and 3 had better up-time than tier 1, response tiers 2 - 3 are virtualized, was driver for tier 1 virtualization as well.  So, capex, energy and up-time.

Now, Todd is talking about IT complexity, and how a reduction in IT complexity (increase IT agility) will increase business agility.  This gets us to the cloud.  "Business Infrastructure Virtualization". 

VMWare saves energy.  Financial energy, capital and operations expense.  Human energy, shift from serving hardware to serving the business. Earth's energy, can get up to 80% savings on data center energy costs with virtualization.

Tod has moved on to the Platform, talking about vMotion and consolidation.  Vsphere moves from hypervisor to helping build a "giant software mainframe".  [begs the question, why not an actual mainframe, but I digress]

TechTonic shift slide up now, Cloud is in top right position: frictionless deployment, self-service environment (and more).

"Cloud computing is not a destination, but a way of doing computing". 

Tod mentions desktop management product coming in November, solves the "PC over IP" issue.

Now, the internal cloud (private cloud).  Doesn't see internal datacenters and clouds going away.  Does see internal extending to external via virtual private clouds.

Tod mentions VMWare's announcement today: "VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced the opening of a new green IT datacenter in East Wenatchee, Washington."  VMWare will share Green Data Center lessons with customers.

Tod is taking questions from the audience.  Interesting that the questions focus on virtualizing the desktop, not servers.  A little (friendly) Apple bashing.