VMware Not in Competition with Amazon in Cloud
VMware Not in Competition with Amazon in Cloud by UCStrategies Staff
Earlier this year, in February, the CEO at VMware, Pat Gelsinger, and COO of the same company, Carl Eschenbach, made some incendiary comments about Amazon Web Services, whilst at the same time, encouraging their customers to keep away from the company’s public cloud.
Last week, both Gelsinger and Eschenbach stated that Amazon had done a “good job” of innovating the public cloud space, but still do not manage to meet the needs of enterprises.
Gelsinger said: “Some will say we're competing, and at some level we are. But really, we're not. [Amazon’s] focus on customers is really different.”
Earlier in the year, Gelsinger stated that VMware would be developing a public cloud alternative that would be able to keep customers from migrating to AWS. He said: “We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds.”
In February, Eschenbach had also stated: “I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books,” but last week added that the bookseller reference had been made to highlight that VMware was more experienced in the enterprise than its counterpart.
With regard to his earlier comments, Eschenbach said: “I said that in a tongue-in-cheek way to draw the point that we have the opportunity going forward, based on our current investments, to extend the software-defined data center into the public cloud.”
Despite what has been said, AWS does present a challenge to VMware’s business, and the former is chasing corporate workloads as well as SaaS vendors that are operating on AWS. Some months ago, AWS also beat IBM for a 10-year $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA, which could open the company up for more business with other government agencies and large enterprises.
VMware, at present, does not seem too concerned about AWS’ moves in the large public cloud. Amazon began developing its public cloud around 10 years ago, but Eschenbach believes that VMware has a big advantage in the data center.
Eschenbach commented: “We're in the very early innings of this baseball game. A small fraction of workloads are running in the public cloud, and there will be significantly more running in the private cloud than the public cloud.” (CY) Link