Munro sets out moving VMware into services

There are a couple of core steps in the realisation of VMware’s plan to provide IT as a Service (ItaaS) to the business world: a strong push towards offering hybrid cloud as its core infrastructure, and a serious effort to move itself centre stage as a cloud services provider, rather than a virtualisation technology producer. And in the EMEA region, there is one man who is the driving those two towards the future – Richard Munro.

His job title is Technology Lead on hybrid cloud, yet he comes across as some far less interested in the technologies of the subject than in what it can achieve for ultimate users – the business managers and staff that have to generate bottom line value from using the technology.

“I think business people got what ITaaS really means long before IT people did,” he said, speaking to CSW at the recent VMware vForum event at London’s Wembley Stadium. “They very quickly understood that the need was to deliver a service regardless of the underlying IT delivering it.”

And despite working for one of the industry’s heavyweight technology companies he readily agrees with the suggestion that many established IT vendors still seem to have little grasp of what they are actually selling to customers, rather than the IT they assume they are selling.

“These days, the technology is just a capability,” he said. “What adds the value is when you add a business concept to it. And this line of thought follows through to automation. If you apply automation it is just another capability, and users should then apply their own business model to it.”

The underlying technology is still important, of course, and the practical realisation of these business-focused ideas starts with the core technologies that go to make up hybrid cloud infrastructures. To Munro the key advantage of hybrid cloud is that it is an inclusive environment that allows for the use of infiltration selling techniques.

Even if a business is not going to switch everything to the cloud straight away, a hybrid environment can often give a department or two just what they require. In the process, it can then be seen by others to add real value to that department’s operations and can therefore gain credibility across the whole business.

As has been written in CSW and elsewhere before, having artificial demarcations within `cloud’, such as private, public and hybrid, can sometimes be seen as simply marketing justifications for the capabilities any one company can muster. Munro admits to being frustrated at times by having to accommodate these classifications. To him it is all `cloud’, as a deliverable capability.

“But it is still at the stage where it needs a name that means something to people looking to work with it, and they do get the fact that it means not having to make an either/or choices – either stay with the same environment or throw everything out and start again,” he said. “It does mean they can move into the `and’ world.    

It also means that VMware itself can move into the `and’ world, and move towards offering services to customers rather than just the technologies on which they build their own. To Munro, there is now little real advantage in having a technological lead because it is so transitory.

“When it comes to making a technology decision these days there is no real competitive advantage, for if I can do it today, you can do it tomorrow,” he said. “It is a choice that still needs to be made, of course, but the real choice now is `what do I do with this technology? Can I use it to re-think the paradigm of the business operation?’”

The move to delivering services does, of course, then raise another issue: what actually constitutes a service for VMware? Munro is well aware of this problem, and he indicated that horizontal market sectors, such as bringing together the tools and applications that could provide a core toolset for organisations looking to move into vertical market service aggregation, forms part of his thinking on the subject.

And it is this area, in its broadest sense, that he is really targeting. “Partners, partners, partners,” is his mantra going forward. When it comes to addressing the needs of vertical market sectors he sees them as the front line for building the business services those markets will require.

“In the services area we have the skills and technology base to provide the innovation, but we are looking to partners and the ISV community to make a real contribution. They are the ones that can focus on what they are good at,” he said. “But we can help them. We already have an Apps Marketplace open that is hybrid cloud-aware.”