VMware boss believes clients are too fat

By Stan Beer
Wednesday, 15 October 2008 04:56

Strategy

The head of virtualisation kingpin VMware believes that the current climate - both economic and physical - will force enterprises to put the desktops of employees on USB sticks. While this might not spell good news for the purveyors of fat clients like Dell, HP and Acer, VMware CEO Paul Maritz is adamant that it's a key way to cut costs and save the climate.

VMware, of course, is in the business of helping companies do more with less hardware, particularly at the server end of their IT infrastructure. So when economic times are hard and everybody is talking about cutting costs as well as saving the planet, as Maritz gleefully points out, his company has a fairly compelling message.

Maritz, in Australia for a client and prospective customers forum this week, was not backward in coming forward about how the rest of the world's bad news is actually gold for VMware.

"The current economic climate will serve as impetus for IT organisations to take action to get costs under control. Virtualisation is a key to do that," Maritz said at a media conference.

VMware's activities in the server rationalisation area, where the company gets most of its revenue, are well known. However, the company is now pushing ahead with strategies to capitalise on what it believes is massive potential in the established desktop and emerging cloud computing spaces.

Rationalisation of the client desktop area, which VMware calls its vClient strategy, is a growing market which the company intends to capture. vClient is the roadmap for VMware to free organisations from the tyranny of desktop infrastructure.

"Most organisations don't have a good strategy for their client (computers)," said Maritz. "We need to equip organisations so that it doesn't matter what device their employees are using.

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