VMware CEO Paul Maritz's eyes sparkle every time he mentions the
"one giant computer" he intends to create out of each customer's
messy agglomeration of decades' worth of IT sprawl. But his sparkle
is that of a confident innovator rather than that of a delusional
dreamer.
Over the past several years, VMware has become one of the
industry's most-influential as well as fast-growing companies by
pioneering virtualization and creating a brand almost synonymous
with one of the dominant IT themes of the decade.
But as VMware has blown past an annual run rate of USD 2 billion,
it has also moved into a no-man's land where either standing still
or moving into new categories is fraught with enormous risk.
By standing pat, VMware could become a whale in a pond with rapidly
diminishing sources of food; or, by striking out into adjacent and
higher-level markets, VMware could face pitched battles against
companies 10 or 20 or even 50 times its size.
So VMware has decided to escalate its virtualization strategy far
beyond the world of IT infrastructure and into the areas of
application and user-device virtualization, while also dramatically
fortifying its capabilities in end-to-end IT management.
But Maritz knows—perhaps better than anyone—that a
dynamic whiteboard-based vision for how to weave together that one
giant computer isn't quite the same as having achieved it in the
marketplace. So in an interview at VMware headquarters last week,
Maritz laid out the latest version of his company's three-level
strategy for stringing together infrastructure, applications, and
end-user devices in a way that lets VMware help customers save not
only on CapEx but also on OpEx—and beyond.
"It's a significant evolution—as I said, we go from being a
narrower CapEx play to really being an OpEx play to being a 'here's
how you do IT' play. It is an ambitious journey and an ambitious
agenda, and we can't do it all alone," Maritz said.
"Often I get asked the question, 'Aren't you worried about
getting squashed by Microsoft here?' And of course I am worried
about it, but I like to say that's good and bad news. The bad news
is that pulling this kind of journey off is really
hard—there's a lot of hand-waving here in terms of stuff that
has to be invented and executed, and there aren't good instances of
saying, 'Well, we'll just go copy whatever XYZ did here'—this
is genuinely new stuff. The good news is, it's hard--and that means
that if you execute well—a big if; underscore the
if—then you can stay relevant."