2016, a year of industry friendliness

calendar Jan 9, 2017 · 3 min read · vmware vmug nutanix aws microsoft dell  ·
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You may have seen various posts in blogs and social media over the past few days about VMware staff accounts being blocked from joining the Nutanix community website, and the VMware User Group- VMUG- blocking Nutanix staff from leadership committees. I’m not party to the detail or the reasons behind these moves, but I’m surprised at the developments with the backdrop of 2016’s collaborative direction. As an industry we managed so well being friendly in 2016 despite the divisive world landscape with things like the US Election and Brexit, what happened over the Christmas break to mess this up? Here’s a few things I picked up on in the past year which paint a picture of much more inter-vendor friendliness, hopefully the issues in this particular case will be ironed out quickly and we can revert to business as usual.

VMware (and Amazon Web Services)

VMware’s 2016 announcement that you will soon be able to run their hypervisor on AWS may have rubbed a few of the vCloud Air vendors the wrong way by picking a collaboration with their biggest competitor. However, look at the positives- VMware are creating a standard platform whereby customers can take the workloads they run on AWS and port them to one of the smaller vendors if it makes sense to do so. This could even be automated- if AWS is more expensive in a particular month than another provider, some or all of the customers workloads can be migrated across.

The Dell purchase of EMC (and therefore VMware) had a few people worried that the hardware side of the VMware ecosystem would be destroyed- DellEMC would push their own traditional , storage, compute tin and hyperconverged platforms at the expense of the competition. Both Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger have been consistent in their message that this won’t happen.

There’s also other good signs from VMware with their VM encryption package in vSphere. Rather than providing a VMware Key Management System, or insisting on an application provided elsewhere under the Dell Technologies umbrella- the requirement is just for a KMIP compliant service.

Microsoft Loves Everything

Microsoft also surprised a few people with their friendly approach to former competition recently- even to the extent that Steve Jobs and Amazon’s Alexa featured prominently in a Keynote at a recent Microsoft event I attended.

We’ve seen for some time that Microsoft Loves Linux  and Open Source. And these days they get on pretty well with Apple and Google these days, focusing on their flagship applications on Android, iOS, and MacOS and sometimes adding features there ahead of their own OS.

#VMUGgate

So, I hope this current grumbling between Nutanix and VMware either turns out to be nothing or everyone turns around and agrees to just get on. The London VMUG team sound like they agree: