VMware: Stick with us because Amazon will kill us all
#SuryaRay #Surya VMware has gone to the mattresses — telling its reseller and systems integration partners that if corporate workloads go to the Amazon cloud, everyone else is dead.
I’m exaggerating, but not much. Accounts out of VMware’s partner conference in Las Vegas this week really lay it out: CRN quotes VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger telling VMware partners that “if a workload goes to Amazon [Web Services], you lose, and we have lost forever.”
Gelsinger continued:
“We want to own corporate workload … We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever.”
So who loses or wins here? Would it really be everyone or would it be VMware? No one is blind to the fact that Amazon Web Services’ growing power is of huge concern to legacy IT vendors and even to some of AWS’ own partners, but VMware hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory when it comes to partner relationships. Long-time VMware partners always complain about having to compete with VMware sales in the field. And, Gelsinger’s verbiage sounds very much like Microsoft whining a few years ago that Microsoft partners lose when customers go to Google Apps.
It’s a never-ending story; vendors love their VAR and integration partners until the vendor hits critical mass and business matures. Then those partners — and the margin they take from vendors — become an albatross and it’s time to go direct or to cut partner margin. Guess who loses then.
Conflating your own vendor-specific interests with those of your partners (and users) is tricky stuff, as Matt Asay writes in ReadWrite.
CRN also quoted VMware President and COO Carl Eschenbach saying: “I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.”
To which, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels responded on Twitter:
@beaker as long as people see us as a bookstore, we are fine :-)
— Werner Vogels (@Werner) February 28, 2013
The problem VMware has is that many of its own partners don’t see huge value in selling vCloud Director: Many will provide it but they often offer other options — OpenStack etc.– as well. VMware’s advantage is that nearly every company of any size runs vSphere in-house, but parlaying that virtualization dominance into the public cloud has proven difficult. Fair or not, VMware is seen as the expensive, proprietary option while AWS has become the go-to plan, at least for test and development environments. Now Amazon is pushing hard to win production workloads as evidenced by its big AWS: Reinvent show last November.
Here’s the thing: Gelsinger’s a smart guy. If he really wants VMware partners to fight its battles, it has to start being better to its partners and stop competing with them in the field. 
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http://dlvr.it/31c8qh @suryaray
A month after launching its subscription-based Office 365 Home Premium for individuals, Microsoft today launched a major update to Office 365 for business users. Just like in its previous incarnation, Office 365 for Business will feature cloud-based online versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, as well as all of the standard Office web applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote (and InfoPath, Access, Active Directory integration and other tools, depending on the version you subscribe to). Starting with today’s update, Microsoft will also offer a set of new versions of Office for small and midsize businesses. In addition, Microsoft now offers the Office 365 ProPlus package, which offers business users the full versions of the standard Office apps as a service for up to five devices at $144 per user per year (including a set of management tools for IT departments). The number of small- and medium-sized businesses using Office 365 has grown by 150 percent in the past 12 months. The new ProPlus packages is also included in Microsoft’s Office 365 Enterprise offerings and the new Office 365 Midsize Business package. This new Midsize Business version is meant for businesses with between ten and 250 employees. As Microsoft’s general manager for its Office Division Kirk Gregerson told me earlier this week, most of these businesses don’t always have IT departments and if they do, they typically only have an IT generalist on staff. Because of this, the Midsize Business edition comes with simplified IT tools that take away a great deal of the complexity of managing all of these users. It also comes with Active Directory integration and business hours phone support. The price for this version is $180 per user for an annual subscription. For smaller businesses with one to ten users, Microsoft is now offering a new plan for $150 per user per year that mostly focuses on email, calendaring video conferencing and website tools. Yammer, which Microsoft acquired last year, is now part of the Office 365 for Enterprise edition, but Gregerson noted that the company isn’t making any specific announcements about how and if it plans to add the service to other versions as well. According to Microsoft, Office 365 is “one of the fastest growing businesses in Microsoft history. After only 18 months, one in five of Microsoft’s enterprise customers now has the paid service, up from one in seven a year ago.” Among 
This sure took a while, but Microsoft just 
