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The contemporary IT vendor's life's calling is remediating the sins of the client-server generation, says Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, the Silicon Valley dominatrix of the server virtualization market. Maritz admits to having been part of the culture that caused the explosion of x86 servers in the 90's, all of which are currently "idling away" at fraction of their capacity.

VMware has taken the first step in remediating the sins of Maritz and his peers by building virtualization technologies that have driven utilization rates up. The company has now developed a strategy for taking the next step, beyond virtualization. The CEO shared the future roadmap at an industry event in San Francisco on Wednesday.

TWO KEY TRENDS EXERT FORCE ON INDUSTRY DIRECTION
According to Maritz, there are two major forces at work in today's IT industry. First is the "tremendous demand to do more with less" within enterprises. The challenge is that while doing more with less requires new technology, "they can't rewrite applications overnight. There's an enormous backlog of applications that are going to be taken into the future."

The challenging aspect is running these legacy applications on new types of infrastructure, namely cloud, to increase efficiency. "How do we take existing applications and move them forward?"

Virtualization has been part of the answer but does not completely solve the problem.

At the same time, new applications are being written and the challenges associated with deploying these applications are the second major force at play. These applications are written in fundamentally different ways: different in the way they are delivered to users and different in the way they use infrastructure.

OS LOOSES SIGHT OF HARDWARE AND APPLICATIONS
VMware's strategy for playing in the market driven by these trends is to focus on the two layers that have emerged below and above the operating system.

"Role of the traditional operating system is changing," Maritz said. The traditional OS coordinated hardware and provided abstracted services to applications. Today, both of those roles are increasingly being taken over by other layers. Coordination of hardware has been taken over by a new layer, of which virtualization is a big part. There are now more and more server OS's that no longer see hardware. This layer will increasingly play a central role as clouds evolve.

"At the same time, the role of providing abstracted services to applications is also largely being filled by different layers." It is being taken over by programming frameworks.

As a result, the server OS no longer touches the hardware or the application. According to Maritz, some of the most profound impacts on what happens with IT architectures will be delivered in these two layers and VMware is focusing on both.

Underneath the OS, the company has shifted its focus away from the hypervisor. "The traditional hypervisor has become commoditized. We're happy to give you a free hypervisor."

EMERGING NEW LAYERS ABOVE AND BELOW THE OS
For VMware, it is no longer about the hypervisor. It is about the new non-OS layer of hardware coordination that must be able to stitch together large amounts of hardware so that they look like one powerful computer to the layers above. "The good news for a company like us is that it's damn difficult to do," Maritz said.

VMware is investing heavily into the layer of infrastructure coordination, with numerous big releases planned for the near future.

"At the same time, we're investing in the framework layer. You'll see us expand on our repertoire of frameworks over the coming quarters."

VMware is focusing on the framework layer for two reasons and the first reason is that through this layer it gains access to developers, Maritz explained. "That's where developers are going. These new frameworks ÔÇô precisely because of what they are ÔÇô are very intimate with the application. It's an advantage to become more intimate with the application."

The second reason for VMware to focus on programming frameworks is the need for application portability across clouds as the underlying infrastructure is becoming increasingly opaque. "Clouds at the infrastructure level are becoming the new hardware. Amazon isn't going to tell you what they're diddling around down below."

As cloud computing evolves, there will be a "hard surface," below which developers will not be able to see. That means software instrumentation is going to have to be done elsewhere and that is where VMware's frameworks come into play.

The company is currently working with Salesforce.com to upgrade the cloud-service provider's Force.com development platform. Leveraging its recent $362m acquisition of SpringSource (VMware's largest M&A transaction to date), the idea is to develop an API for Force.com that will enable developers to move applications in and out of SpringSource. SpringSource is a popular development platform for Java developers.

VMware is also working in a similar way with Google to abstract App Engine, also a cloud-based development platform.

The goal is for a developer to have a simple drop-box in their SpringSource window, letting them choose where to deploy their application: App Engine or Force.com. "At the framework level, we will cloak their cloud."

VMWARE'S COMPETITION LANDSCAPE
Amazon Web Services has so far chosen to abstract infrastructure at a lower level than Salesforce.com or Google have, so Amazon cloud services will not be included in VMware's new version of SpringSource. If Amazon does decide to do the same thing as the other two large cloud-service providers are doing, however, VMware would welcome that move, Maritz said.

Amazon, like IBM, is one of VMware's indirect competitors.

The company's biggest direct competitors are Microsoft and Oracle, who both strive to offer the entire IT stack, including hardware and software.

"They both have a very ambitious agenda of what they want the world to look like. Certainly, a Microsoft view and an Oracle view doesn't leave any room for us."