Tuesday, August 30th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	VMware Reassembles Its Cloud Stack with a New ‘Foundation’ In a rebranding effort that involves IBM, VMware announced this week the assembly of its key virtualization components – including vSphere, Virtual SAN, and NSX, the network virtualization agent – into a kind of VMware cloud stack that will be marketed as a single platform. VMware Cloud Foundation, stated CEO Pat Gelsinger, will become available to new and existing customers through an as-a-service subscription model, the details of which, even now, have not been completely spelled out. “We must address the next industry challenge,” said Gelsinger, “in this world, where clouds and devices and the complexities are accelerating … the key aspect of VMware Cloud Foundation is delivering it as-a-service as well.” Typically, when a vendor delivers a new product under an as-a-service model, it spells out whether subscriptions and licensing will be measured by time, by consumption, or by service category.  Today, when we pressed VMware executives including the CEO for details about this model during a press conference, the responses we received were longer on vision than on detail. “We can deploy VMware Cloud Foundation on-premise, as part of the customer’s data centers, or as part of the data center they’re running through their service provider,” responded Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s executive vice president and general manager for SDDC.  “In that case, VMware Cloud Foundation will accept pre-existing licenses that customers might have purchased for vSphere, Virtual SAN, or NSX.  And we’ll have appropriate tools for customers to go from one to the other.” Whatever-as-a-Service The promise of offering these components as-a-service, including through IBM, could be VMware’s biggest change announcement this year: the hope of freeing customers from what they portray as the most painful licensing constraints they’ve ever faced. But that news is coming in small pieces at a time.  IBM Cloud, for example, will be offering support for Cloud Foundation and will apply customers’ existing VMware licenses to the use of VMware services on IBM Cloud, said Raghuram. Think of Cloud Foundation as a grouping of VMware’s existing services for staging virtual workloads and virtual storage into a stack that is more conducive to managing a hybrid cloud.  The off-premise part of that cloud comes from major public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, as well as IBM Cloud and VMware’s own vCloud Air.  Gelsinger stated Monday that Cloud Foundation’s support for staging and managing workloads on the “Big Three” platforms comes by way of working with their respective public APIs, not through any direct partnership or interaction between VMware and other firms. While analyst Kurt Marko gave VMware executives an opportunity to apply Cloud Foundation to the needs of service providers and large data centers, in response, they made it very clear that Cloud Foundation wasn’t pursuing telcos and communications carriers, but mid- to large-size enterprises in general. Left to right: VMware SVP Raghu Raghuram, CTSO Guido Appenzeller. “When we started to think about Cross-Cloud Services… going into this, my assumption was, an enterprise would have one cloud and one strategic relationship, and go there,” admitted VMware Chief Technology Strategy Officer Guido Appenzeller.  “And I don’t think I’ve ever talked to an enterprise that thinks of the cloud in that way.  At this point, I’ve talked to over a hundred of them.” With a typical customer adoption pattern, Appenzeller noted, one team builds an app within either on-premise resources or one public cloud, chosen by the team.  Moving it between clouds would mean altering the application, but due to circumstances, the organization simply can’t shut the application down to make those alterations.  So it needs a new staging mechanism. If you ask that customer how many public clouds it would ideally prefer to be in, he continued, “the vast majority of the answers, about 70 percent, are saying, ‘We want to be in multiple public clouds, because there’s a major cost factor.  We want multi-vendor so we’re not locked in.  We might have geographic differences, performance differences, and we want to be able to leverage [different] pricing. “There’s a desire for our customers to be in multiple public clouds,” the CTSO continued.  “And I would argue it’s almost stronger in the larger enterprises.” Cross-Cloud Services In addition to Cloud Foundation, the newest component of VMware’s stack is its Cross-Cloud Services management component.  During Monday’s keynote session, Appenzeller showed the audience an early tech preview of this SaaS-based component, which will be offered to select VMware customers for testing beginning today. The key objective of this component is to keep track of public cloud resource consumption across public clouds: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and VMware’s vCloud Air and vCloud Air Network (still separate items).  An administrator can perform service discovery of active applications across multiple clouds, cost analysis of resources consumed in each of these public clouds, and monitoring of active status. As Appenzeller demonstrated, the service is actually a kind of wide-ranging NSX propagation system, deploying NSX instances throughout cloud-based workloads to serve as monitoring agents and policy enforcers.  NSX’s existing policy template mechanism is being extended to apply way beyond the on-premise firewall, into public cloud territory. The CTSO showed the creation of a simple policy that ensures the encryption of all traffic from one instance of an application, to another instance.  That policy was obviously being enforced as those instances were split across public cloud boundaries.  Non-encrypted traffic to the database tier was shown to have disappeared, indicating that the same policy being enforced on public clouds as on premises. In another demo, Guido showed how a database-driven application using a separate database tier was migrated between two Azure data centers – one in the eastern US, the other in Ireland.  The actual migration would still take hours, utilizing continuous replication, though he did present a fully-baked result.  Key to this migration was that the workloads moved while the database was live, and while it remained in active use throughout. During Monday’s press conference, VMware SVP Raghuram noted that subscriptions to VMware Cross-Cloud Services will be treated separately from the components in its new Cloud Foundation. (Comment on this)
4:47p	Michael Dell Plans to Keep On Making Deals After EMC Acquisition (Bloomberg) — Michael Dell, who is preparing to complete the largest merger in technology history after taking his own company private three years ago, says there’s even more deal-making in his future. “We’ll continue to do acquisitions,” Dell said in an interview Monday in Las Vegas at VMworld, an annual conference put on by VMware, which is majority-owned by EMC and will become part of the new Dell Technologies when Dell and EMC complete their $67 billion merger later this year. “I also think that alliances will continue to be super important to us — alliances and partnerships, both for Dell Technologies and for VMware.” See also: Is Dell and EMC a Done Deal? Dell, Chief Executive Officer and founder of his namesake personal-computer company, agreed to buy EMC in October 2015, aiming to broaden both companies’ product lineups — from servers to storage devices and key software services — amid intensifying competition. Hardware companies are facing pressure from cloud-based products that enable customers to rent computing power from Amazon.com Inc. or Google, rather than buying and maintaining their own systems from the likes of Dell and EMC. EMC shareholders approved the Dell merger with 98 percent support in July. Before the deal is finalized the companies must still receive regulatory approval from China. The merger is on track to be completed in the period ending in October, within the original timeline, Michael Dell said Monday in a separate press conference. In 2013, Dell took his company private for about $25 billion. See also: VMware Reassembles Its Cloud Stack With a New ‘Foundation’ Server Share Meanwhile, Dell has been making progress with key product lines. Its server line grabbed 18.3 percent of the global market in the first quarter, up from 18 percent in the year-earlier period, according to IDC. Still, the overall market for those powerful machines shrunk by 3.6 percent. In PCs, Dell desktop and laptop computers accounted for 16 percent of shipments in the second quarter, up from 14.6 percent. The total PC market declined, though at a slower pace. The external storage business, including products Dell will gain with the EMC acquisition, is under pressure, shrinking by 3.7 percent industrywide in the first quarter, according to IDC. “The market will do what it’s going to do,” Dell said. “What we see is a tremendous opportunity here, bringing together servers, storage, virtualization, software-defined, converged, hyper-converged.” VMware, which specializes in virtualization software that makes data centers more efficient, has fared better of late, reporting second-quarter sales that topped estimates, while EMC met analysts’ projections for unchanged quarterly revenue. Michael Dell and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger both said they expect VMware to continue to devote a big portion of its resources to research and development. At its event in Las Vegas, VMware touted new products that help customers manage applications hosted in the cloud. “This is a period of consolidation in the industry,” Gelsinger said, adding that the companies are “better together.” (Comment on this)
5:46p	Report: Google Frontrunner as PayPal Shops for Cloud Services PayPal is shopping for cloud services, and Google has emerged as the frontrunner, ahead of market leaders Amazon and Microsoft, as the online payments giant weighs its options, CNBC reported citing anonymous sources. Winning the PayPal cloud deal would give a major boost to Google’s recent effort to prove itself in the cloud services market, where it has been trailing far behind Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft Azure in terms of revenue. Closing marquee customers is one way to make the case that Google is a serious opponent to the other two giants. Other well-known customers of Google’s cloud services include Best Buy, Coca Cola, Domino’s, HTC, zulily, and most recently Spotify. PayPal recently made a substantial investment in a private cloud in its own data centers, replacing VMware-based environments with a private PayPal cloud built using OpenStack, the family of open source cloud infrastructure software. Read more: Why PayPal Replaced VMware With OpenStack Using public cloud services by Google or any other provider wouldn’t spell the end of the private PayPal cloud or of PayPal’s own data centers, the CNBC report said, although it did not point to a source for this information. Some companies move to the cloud completely and shutter most of their own data center capacity, while others adopt a mixed model, often referred to as hybrid cloud. There have been examples of both. Salesforce recently inked a major cloud deal with AWS but said it would use Amazon’s cloud to speed up service roll-out in new markets while continuing to operate its own data centers. In fact, it recently acquired a data center management technology startup called Coolan, whose founder said his team would help Salesforce fine-tune its data center strategy. Netflix is an example of a more wholesale move to the cloud. The company has transitioned nearly all of its infrastructure to AWS. The only piece it still keeps in colocation data centers around the world is its content delivery network. With about 70 percent market share, AWS made about $7.88 billion in revenue from its Infrastructure-as-a-Service alone in 2015, according to Structure Research. Microsoft’s $1.2 billion made it a distant second. Google was sixth in terms of IaaS revenue ($281 million) and market share (2.5 percent), below Rackspace, IBM, and Alibaba, in that order, according to the market research firm. Read more: Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning (Comment on this)
6:00p	SonicWALL Makes Ready For Split From Dell Brought to you by MSPmentor Hoping to stave off any anxiety about SonicWALL’s looming separation from Dell, officials of the cybersecurity firm today announced a new partner program, refined incentives and a hosted cloud security solution. The revelations came during the first full day of the Dell Peak 16 conference in Las Vegas, where 744 partners are gathered for keynotes, product demonstrations and breakout sessions. SonicWALL will be operated as a standalone company once the separation is complete, possibly by the end of October. Thus far, SonicWALL officials say, reaction from partners has been unequivocally positive. See also: What About Dell’s Own Huge Data Center Software Portfolio? “Our channel is excited,” said Curtis Hutcheson, vice president and general manager of security solutions for Dell Security, which includes SonicWALL. “Ask them.” The annual security confab comes just two months after Dell announced the sale of Dell Software Group (DSG) to private equity players Francisco Partners and Elliot Management. DSG includes SonicWALL, Quest Software and One Identity solutions. See also: Is Dell and EMC a Done Deal? The buyers have expressed their intention to operate the SonicWALL as a standalone brand, while One Identity will become part of Quest Software. Hutcheson pointed to a recent poll of SonicWALL partners in which 35 of 35 partner VARs queried said they were looking forward to the security vendor becoming independent. “That’s without knowing any of the conditions,” Hutcheson said. But that doesn’t mean the stakes aren’t high for SonicWALL as it again becomes its own entity, after being acquired by Dell three years ago. Foremost, SonicWALL needs to stand up its own partner program – distinct from Dell – by the time the separation is complete. Toward that end, the firm announced today the Dell Secure First Partner Program, which will feature a new incentive structure, dubbed “Reward for Value.” “What’s coming is a new partner program optimized for security,” said Steve Pataky, vice president of worldwide sales for Dell Security Solutions. “What we’re announcing today is the construct and the framework for that – the investment strategy (and) incentives.” Among the highlights, partners will receive incremental, stackable discounts for such activities as identifying leads, delivering on proofs of concept, driving renewals and selling solutions that leverage more of SonicWALL’s portfolio. “We have a high-velocity transactional channel,” Pataky said. “Partners do a lot of things to add value,” he continued. “The partner who adds the most value will have the best financial reward in that deal.” Also today, Dell announced the launch of a hosted cloud security program that will allow partners to sell a complete security-as-a-service solution. SonicWALL Cloud GMS (global management system) is going into beta in the fall with general availability expected sometime during the fourth quarter of 2016. Pricing has not yet been set, but the solution is aimed at removing financial and infrastructure barriers for managed services providers and resellers. Cloud GMS is a logical extension of Dell’s partner-hosted global management system, which already boasts more than 100,000 firewalls under management. “We are now hosting it to allow partners to focus on doing the business,” said Patrick Sweeney, vice president of marketing and product management for SonicWALL. “We take care of all the back end infrastructure,” he said, adding that partners with infrastructure can choose to continue to host their own solutions. “Smaller operations will be able to get up and going with hosted GMS in a cost-efficient basis without having to put out a lot of capital costs.” Dell Peak 16 is scheduled to run through Wednesday. This first ran at http://mspmentor.net/msp-mentor/sonicwall-makes-ready-split-dell (Comment on this)
6:29p	It’s Official: Dell and EMC Merger to Close Next Week Dell and EMC announced plans to close the $67 billion merger between the two companies – the biggest merger between technology companies in history – on Wednesday, September 7. The announcement Tuesday follows approval of the transaction by Chinese regulators, the final step in the deal first announced in October 2015. The new company will operate as Dell Technologies. News reports that the two IT giants were close to announcing a closing date for the deal started circulating Monday, as EMC’s subsidiary VMware kicked off its annual VMworld conference in Las Vegas. “Combined, we will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT including digital transformation, software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security,” Dell chairman and CEO, Michael Dell, said in a statement. “Our investments in R&D and innovation, along with our 140,000 team members around the world, will give us unmatched scale, strength and flexibility, deepening our relationships with customers of all sizes. See also: Michael Dell Plans to Keep On Making Deals After EMC Acquisition EMC shareholders will receive $24.05 per share in cash plus tracking stock linked to EMC’s stake in VMware, which is about 80 percent. Once the transaction closes, EMC shares will no longer trade on the New York Stock Exchange. Dell itself went private in 2013 in a $25 billion buyout by Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake. See also: SonicWALL Makes Ready For Split From Dell (Comment on this)

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