Jeff James: One of the things I noticed in the product rollout for vSphere 4.0 is the number of editions of the product you’re providing. Some of them are targeted at the small-to-medium business (SMB) market. Is the introduction of these versions driven by Microsoft entering the market with Hyper-V, or are you responding to the lackluster economic conditions, or is it a combination of factors?
Paul Maritz: It's really a combination of realizing that while there's a high degree of overlap between the needs of the enterprise and the SMB, actually, in a weird way, it's some of the more advanced features that the SMB guys need. But you need to be able to package it and make it in a more complete form for the SMB because they don't have internal staff—they want to just take something and have it work.
So part of it is realizing, while there's a lot of commonality, we have to address the specific needs of the SMB market, which is both a need for greater completeness and a lower price in some cases. We've tried to find that sweet spot that we think will make it easier for our channel partners to reach their customers and do business with them.
And the other thing that I've done in that space is, as you know, since July of last year we've been giving away ESXi. We've had about 9,000 downloads a week of ESXi. A lot of those are people kicking the tires or downloading because they have nothing better to do, but some of those do get deployed and anchored, and even if it's 10 percent, it's still a substantial amount. So one of the packages we have is targeted at providing an upgrade path specifically for those customers.
Jeff James: What would you say to an IT professional or CIO who's evaluating vSphere to convince them to go with vSphere rather than a competitive solution?
Paul Maritz: I think there are two major reasons. One is we can run your aggregate infrastructure more efficiently, whether it be CPU utilization, storage, or power. [We've seen statistics that show that] in certain situations—just by upgrading from VI 3.5 to vSphere 4.0—you can save $2 million in terms of lower power utilization, better storage utilization, et cetera. So, number one, it's greater scale and efficiency, and one of the sub points under that is we can handle any load of knobs. So now, with a straight face, we can say to people, "You should virtualize 100 percent of your x86 environment." The second major reason is it's simpler in high-level management.
Jeff James: That's been a big issue with our readers. We've heard from a lot of readers that managing VMs is difficult.
Paul Maritz: We've done a lot of work to address all those concerns: VM sprawl, VM lifecycle, all of that kind of stuff. You're going to see a lot of management suites come out from us, due in the remainder probably of this year, that target the principle scenarios that people have. One of them is managing the VM lifecycle, how do you prevent VM sprawl, we have things in there where VMs will have predetermined lifespans so unless you do something to them, they blow up.
Jeff James: Like Maxwell Smart.
Paul Maritz: Right, exactly. They'll go away after three months so you don't have zombie VMs running around.
[We've heard from customers that they'd like improved management for] disaster recovery, test and development, and the application-level management. So we're targeting these high-level scenarios with virtual machine, test and development, disaster recovery, and application management solutions, trying to get people up and away from the plumbing.
Jeff James: Microsoft seems to be really good at the care and feeding of its partner ecosystem. It looks like, especially since you've come on board, that VMware has also been really aggressive about building out its partner network. How important are your partner relationships in your strategy for the long-term success of the company?
Paul Maritz: It's absolutely critical from two perspectives. One is we're trying to build a platform, so we have to have a bunch of technology partners, and we're trying to do a better job of working with that collection of people. So one of the things we've done inside our R&D group is to have an organization under a single senior manager who is targeted at how we technically work with people, and trying to make sure we do a better job of getting them information, helping them run certification systems, et cetera.
And one of the big assets we have right now is that there are only three hardware certification environments that really matter. There's Microsoft, Red Hat, and ourselves. If you're a hardware vendor today, basically those are the three environments that you need to certify against. And it's no mean achievement to get one of those, and we have gotten ourselves to the point that we are one of the three entities that anyone who wants to sell infrastructure in the x86 environment has to participate in, and we're trying to grow that and extend it.
The other, I mentioned, partners is obviously our channel and good market partners, which are equally important to us. We're trying to work to extend those to not only do a better job of reaching to and rewarding those channel partners who have been particularly productive for us—make it worth their while to sell our products. Part of it is lowering their costs by giving them better education so they don't have to spend time educating themselves on their own nickel, and secondly making sure that our modern structures are fair and let people do good work. So we have programs like Advantage Plus, whereby channel partners can register a deal so if you really develop that customer and educate the customer, you will get rewarded for it—you won't suffer if someone else sweeps in and steals the deal under your nose.
So we're trying to, as I've said, reward those parts of our channels. Invest in those people who are willing to invest in us. And, in addition, we're also extending our reach to people who are in the services space. So we have this back program—the Value-Added Consultant (stands for VAC) program.
Jeff James: We could really use a glossary of all these different names and acronyms. Microsoft must have generated a few hundred by themselves.
Paul Maritz: Well, we've unfortunately never done that. The only one we screwed up was Advantage Plus because we didn't put a V in front of it. Maybe because it has a V in the middle of it, I don’t know. But basically, those are the kind of programs we're doing—realizing that we need a broader community of people who are providing services in and around our product, and how do we work with them in a way that becomes both important and lucrative for them to do that.