We've certainly seen a lot of change in the mobile device management field over the past few years, and VMWare added to that yesterday when it announced it would be acquiring the self-proclaimed market leader AirWatch for about $1.54 billion. The AirWatch team will remain in place led by chief executive officer John Marshall and will become part of VMware's End-User Computing group, led by Sanjay Poonen, EVP and GM.
VCE, a firm resulting from the joint venture of Cisco, VMware, and EMC, announces its new products and the various enhancements made to its channel partner program.
The new products being rolled out by VCE include an addition to the Vblock 300 line of converged infrastructure systems and two other purpose-built systems that support high-performance databases (such as those by Oracle) and extreme applications.
Silver Peak is a WAN optimization specialist which last week announced integration capabilities between its data acceleration software and VMware's new network virtualization technology. The company says that this move will mean that application and traffic flow between virtual machines can be strengthened.
The NSX is a game-changer, according to VMware, and will allow virtualized data center networks to become available by changing high-end features of switches, routers and other networking gear into software.
Earlier this year, in February, the CEO at VMware, Pat Gelsinger, and COO of the same company, Carl Eschenbach, made some incendiary comments about Amazon Web Services, whilst at the same time, encouraging their customers to keep away from the company's public cloud.
Last week, both Gelsinger and Eschenbach stated that Amazon had done a "good job" of innovating the public cloud space, but still do not manage to meet the needs of enterprises.
VMware is seeking to make gains with end-user computing (software which connects enterprise apps and data with employees' notebooks and mobile devices), as the company expands beyond server virtualization.
Sanjay Poonen is a veteran of VMware's big data analytics and mobility efforts, and is now responsible for the drive towards the company's end-user computing unit; his title is executive vice president and general manager of end-user computing at VMware.
The CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger, recently explained how VMware is working with OpenStack, which is a set of tools used for developing and managing infrastructure-as-a-service clouds.
In response to concerns regarding the testing of OpenStack by VMware customers, Gelsinger noted: "We are building a strategy that will support OpenStack in a very effective way."
He added that OpenStack remains "immature" and "an incremental opportunity" for VMware, which may suggest that it will take some time before VMware's strategy of selling to OpenStack customers is built up.
Over the last year, a number of top executives at VMware have left the company, and there has been rising concern regarding VMware's ability to transition in a market where its core server virtualization hypervisor has become a commodity.
Last week, however, the company's Q2 report exceeded Wall Street's expectations, showing it has much more to offer.
Cloud Foundry is an open source platform-as-a-service being developed by Pivotal, the EMC-VMware big data startup; this is now being backed by IBM.
This move means that IBM will be able to assist developers get apps to the cloud, without worrying about the compatibility of technology.
Both The Wall Street Journal and Reuters reported that Samsung is close to signing a deal to provide mobile devices to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Navy. The FBI, in particular, has over 35,000 employees who currently use BlackBerry devices. Whether BlackBerry devices would be replaced by Android-powered Galaxy models or whether handsets from both manufacturers would be used are still not clear at this point.
Some analysts see the forthcoming government deal as proof that mobile has arrived in the enterprise.
The Zimbra suite of open source SaaS productivity apps has been sold by VMware to Dallas, Texas-based Telligent, an enterprise social software vendor. Details regarding the terms of the deal have not been made available.
The core team of employees at Zimbra, its product IP, and customer and partner relationships are all going to Telligent. Once the deal has closed, Telligent will rebrand itself as Zimbra.