"We're trying to get customers from 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent virtualization to 100 percent virtualization and we need better management tools to manage that," Nielsen says. Things like capacity planning, things to manage VM proliferation and lifecycle. In the virtual world you could have a VM with a lifespan of 30 minutes; we have to be able to plan for that, provision it and clean up after it."
"In the near term that's certainly their best revenue source," Haff says. "With virtualization covering such a small percentage of systems, they don't have to catch 100 percent of all the potential customers; they just have to do well catching the 85 percent that's not virtualized yet."
VMware will also continue developing services it didn't think would be major issues for its traditional customers, Nielsen says.
SMB customers, for example, are far more interested in the high-availability/data-recovery capabilities of virtual infrastructures than VMware execs thought, Nielsen says. In the past it hasn't been a lack of interest that limited those functions in SMB markets, it's been the price.
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