breathalize

The keynote this morning resonated with me on various levels. In particular the phrasing of IT as a Service as being ‘optimizing IT production for business consumption’ marries up with my company’s view on how we want to deliver services to the end user.

In our case this means both the internal end users within the company, and our external customer base. The last three years have seen a massive jump in the products we are delivering externally – with it came a massive expansion of servers that underpinned it. This was possible due to a significant investment in VMware that allowed us to grow out eight development environments.

This flexibility has meant the company is hungry to keep innovating, with a degree of confidence that it can be supported. The risk however is that maintaining, and growing the infrastructure with the agility required becomes more and more complicated.

VMware deem the management of this as four key factors:

• Efficient Pooling
• Elastic Resource Scheduling
• Automation through Policy
• Open and Interoperable

Up until now, Enterprise Plus has not been a requirement for us but if we want to employ vCloud Director as the umbrella app for the estate we will need to evaluate the up-shift in licence costs and the overhead of deploying Oracle and Linux in a mostly Windows house.

The end user experience was also of interest in the speech – the comment about the CEO turning up with his iPad had already happened to us and the flow of devices are ramping up to the point we are having to look at appliances that can secure any device within the corporate workforce. Coupled with a recent wireless implementation, portable access to Windows machines is going to accelerate device adoption even faster, but at a rate controlled by us. Project Horizon looks to extend this with a centrally maintained and distributable ‘app store’ whereby the user experience drives the access and its consumption.

So some good messages coming from VMware – and they are attacking on a lot of new fronts across what they called the ‘New Stack’.