VMware, Once the “Easiest Value Proposition in IT,” Defines Its New Role

At VMware, a company that about a decade ago enjoyed selling the “easiest value proposition in IT history,” staying relevant today, in a world where most enterprise applications are already running on virtual machines, and where companies have a constantly expanding universe of infrastructure options for their software, never stops being a work in progress.

John Gilmartin, a VMware VP and general manager of is Integrated Systems business unit, says that if Intel is correct when it says that “the paranoid survive,” than there’s nothing that doesn’t make VMware paranoid. “Are you being relevant? Are you investing in things that are important?” Answers to those questions are moving targets nowadays.

After more than a tryst with becoming a cloud service provider – the vCloud Air days – the Palo Alto-based outfit whose impact on the data center industry is yet to be matched as far a software makers go, is now squarely back to doing what it’s always been good at: making data center software. Let those who excel at building and managing data centers build and manage data centers, goes the thinking. Those would be the likes of Amazon Web Services, now VMware’s biggest ally in the cloud space. VMware is going to focus on making the life of its core audience — the enterprise IT shops — easier as they traverse a world where one cloud simply won’t cut it.

Gilmartin expanded on this in an interview for The Data Center Podcast recently. We talked about VMware’s current cloud strategy, reflected on the company’s impact on the data center industry (the whole one server instead of 10 thing turned out to be a big deal), and what it’s like to be part of its new parent, Dell Technologies.

Here it is, The Data Center Podcast, Episode 3, with John Gilmartin of VMware: