Stan Beer
Wednesday, 15 October 2008 05:56
IT Industry -
Strategy
Page 1 of 2
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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