VMware Inc.’s diverse enterprise infrastructure product line has found its way into the vast majority of information technology shops around the world. Uncover the company’s DNA, however, and it’s clear VMware is a hypervisor company at its core.
So when VMware announced at its VMworld conference this week that its flagship hypervisor ESXi will no longer be the center of its world, but rather will cede that position to the software container orchestration system Kubernetes, we know we’re dealing with Innovators’ Dilemma-level disruption.
Kubernetes takes the spotlight
In contrast to IBM Corp.’s hands-off strategy with its recent acquisition of Red Hat Inc., VMware went all-in to incorporate Kubernetes wunderkind Heptio Inc. — which it bought in November 2018, bringing in talent such as co-founder and now VMware Principal Engineer Joe Beda (pictured, right, with VMware Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger) — into its core vSphere virtualization platform.
The result was a plethora of Kubernetes-related announcements, the most significant of which is likely Project Pacific, which will rework vSphere with native Kubernetes. “Embedding Kubernetes into the control plane of vSphere will transform the platform—enabling it to converge containers and VMs onto a single platform,” according to a VMware press release. “Project Pacific will also add a container runtime into the hypervisor.”
VMware’s willingness essentially to revamp its core technology along cloud-native lines is remarkably profound and should dispel any doubts about whether VMware would be able to overcome the Innovators’ Dilemma.
Read the entire article at https://siliconangle.com/2019/08/30/cloud-native-disruption-comes-focus-vmworld/.
(Disclosure: Kemp Technologies and NetScout are Intellyx customers, and VMware is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. VMware provided Jason Bloomberg with a free pass to VMworld, a standard industry practice.)
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