VMware goes for ITaaS to match business demands

The natural follow on from Software Defined Networking and the Software Defined Datacentre is the inevitable drift towards Software Defined Everything, with company IT departments moving from a role as the `owners’ of the technology employed and the unending task of keeping the business lights on, to one as the curator of services required by the business.

That, at least, is the view of VMware’s EMEA CTO, Joe Baguley. He was speaking at this week’s vForum event, held at London’s Wembley Stadium, and was observing the growing pressure for new services and development of increased business agility that is being placed on IT departments and the IT industry by business users.

“Things Are speeding up,,” he observed, “and the demands from business users are now starting to outstrip the IT industry’s ability to deliver. The goal we have to aim at is a self-service infrastructure that conforms to IT requirements.”

Getting to that point, however, is still some way off, though VMware’s re-positioning of its technologies and capabilities is, he suggested, bringing it a good deal closer. This includes the much greater emphasis on vCloud as the fulcrum of its offerings, and the realisation that the company needs to become a deliverer of services that foster the growth and development of business, rather than a supplier of technology.

Evidence of the way the IT industry has both speeded up its ability to respond to business needs, while at the same time is still failing to meet business user needs or expectations, can be seen in the results of a recent, large scale survey conducted by researchers, Vanson Bourne, on behalf of the company.

This surveyed 1,800 IT decision makers and 3,600 office workers in companies with 100+ employees in the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Nordics, Russia & The Middle East using a hybrid approach of telephone and online interviewing between March and April 2014.

The results show that 80 percent of IT decision makers in the UK believe there is a significant gap between what the business wants and when IT can deliver it. This compares to only 65 percent of IT decision makers across Europe. In the UK, the average gap is five months, with over a quarter believing that the gap is between seven and 18 months.

This misalignment between business and IT can carry significant ramifications for the performance, competitiveness and growth prospects of organisations. In the UK, 51 percent of IT decision makers cited the reduced likelihood of innovation across all departments, while 52 percent saw reduced staff productivity and 35 percent loss of customers to more agile competitors as the most significant implications of the gap.

As Baguley observed, this does represent an improvement. “It used to be a three year cycle, but the trouble is business now wants this down to just days, possibly even less,” he said. “And it is still the case that only 30 percent of the typical IT budget goes to innovation, developing new applications and services. The rest goes on keeping the lights on.”

It is perhaps an indicator of the difficulties that play around the issue of applications development that, despite VMware’s efforts over many years in promoting virtualisation as way of improving systems management and cutting operating costs, this percentage between innovation and keeping the lights on has barely changed over the last 20 years or more.

Baguley sees business as now well into a three-phase journey to the full implementation of the cloud, with Phase one being focussed on Capex savings through consolidation and Phase 2 concentrating on Quality of Service and reliability through automation. Most businesses on the cloud journey are to be found somewhere between these two stages.

The third Phase is, he suggests, all about Opex and agility, which is his next target – the delivery of IT as a Service.

“This is built around the Software Defined Datacentre, which in turn needs policy-based management and automation, which is what VMware can now provide,” he said.

Providing important parts of the management and security piece of this package  is why VMware has acquired AirWatch, for mobile security.

“This covers every mobile device including wearables,” Baguley said. “It also covers every mobile platform – even Symbian – and every mobile deployment.”

The company is also enhancing the technology in order to make management faster and easier. For example, it has started to put more operational functionality into the hypervisor as software definable operations rather than separate entities. For example, both network switching and virtual storage management – in the form of a virtual SAN – are now software elements of the hypervisor.