The Challenges of Market Transitions
Earlier today VMware announced that they had acquired the assets, people and operations of online storage service Mozy from EMC.
Almost immediately, the Twitterverse was calling out VMware for
abandoning their current business model, primarily acting as a vendor,
selling to Enterprise/Commercial businesses and Service Providers. Mozy
currently operators as a Cloud Storage provider (to both consumers and
small-business), so questions arose about whether this now put VMware in
competition with their existing (or future) Service Provider customers.
Considering how rapidly the IT landscape is changing, I had to step back and think about whether an action like this completely forces VMware to change their business model or if there were alternative ways to think about it. My immediate thoughts are recorded on the whiteboard picture above. [NOTE: I have no inside-information about what the VMware strategy might be, these are purely guesses. Don't bet your 401(k) on any of my scribbles.]
Putting the VMware/Mozy specifics aside, what was interesting to me in this 10 minute exercise were a few things:
The more I think about this transaction and it's place in the bigger IT marketplace, it highlights that this isn't just an inflection point for the vendors but also for every other piece of the value-chain between technology creator and technology consumer. And since there isn't a clear winner or definitive business model in this transition to cloud computing, the new rules are still to be defined. And just as more analysts are predicting Hybrid Cloud models for many IT usage models, I also suspect that over the next 2-5 years that we'll see the leading IT companies having the capabilities to deliver their technology through a hybrid set of models.
Published at DZone with permission of Brian Gracely, author and DZone MVB. (source)
Considering how rapidly the IT landscape is changing, I had to step back and think about whether an action like this completely forces VMware to change their business model or if there were alternative ways to think about it. My immediate thoughts are recorded on the whiteboard picture above. [NOTE: I have no inside-information about what the VMware strategy might be, these are purely guesses. Don't bet your 401(k) on any of my scribbles.]
Putting the VMware/Mozy specifics aside, what was interesting to me in this 10 minute exercise were a few things:
- Looking at VMware's competitive situation (bottom right of picture), against the dominant software vendors in the industry, do they have any choice but to have at least a portion of their business delivered as a direct cloud service?
- Given that most experts agreed that public cloud computing will be at least a portion of every businesses IT portfolio, is it possible to envision a major IT vendor that doesn't have a portion of their portfolio delivered via public cloud computing?
- Is it possible for any existing IT vendor that currently delivers their portfolio via direct channels (direct, channel partners, service providers) to migrate their portfolio in a way that doesn't completely disrupt their existing revenue models?
The more I think about this transaction and it's place in the bigger IT marketplace, it highlights that this isn't just an inflection point for the vendors but also for every other piece of the value-chain between technology creator and technology consumer. And since there isn't a clear winner or definitive business model in this transition to cloud computing, the new rules are still to be defined. And just as more analysts are predicting Hybrid Cloud models for many IT usage models, I also suspect that over the next 2-5 years that we'll see the leading IT companies having the capabilities to deliver their technology through a hybrid set of models.
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
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