He was at Microsoft for 21 years, responsible for developing major software tools such as Excel and Access, before joining VMware. Chief development officer and executive vice-president, products, at virtualisation major VMware, Richard McAniff and technology could well be his middle name.
With the ‘as-a-service model’ becoming the defining paradigm in technology, where is VMware positioning itself? McAniff charts the evolution from virtualisation to cloud computing and spells out how VMware wants to stay top of the heap.
McAniff said, This new infrastructure model will enable IT to produce services in a self-service model with consistent policies and business contracts, aligning resources to business needs. Central to this strategy is an infrastructure that will enable IT to fundamentally redefine its relationship with the business. Our strategy and products are helping businesses and governments move beyond IT as a cost centre to a more business-centric IT-as-a-service model. The focus is on outcomes like operational efficiency, competitiveness and rapid response.
Since the customers depend on it and industries across all verticals are virtualising most of their critical applications, it implies that virtualisation software needs to work from the first day and has to work better than the physical hardware it runs on. Businesses are at a tipping point with the number of virtual machines being deployed being higher than the number of physical machines, emphasizing that IT-as-a-service is all about the consumer. Mcaniff explains.
McAniff spells out how it would be done: Using virtualisation as a core building block, we want to provide infrastructure as a service by combining all servers and storage in a giant pool of resources and allocating them on-demand to applications via private clouds in the data centre, or public clouds offered by service providers. From that, the thrust is now to accelerate its desktop and application virtualization efforts and move steadily down a one-way road to cloud computing, which is using software services via internet, much like consuming grid electricity. Founded some 12 years ago by engineer-scientist couple Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum, VMware, is a pioneer in server virtualisation.
By helping end-users or developers to provide application clouds that VMware runs, scales and manages, the next step in the VMware cloud transition, will be to deliver application platforms as a service (PaaS), he says.
The primary reason for companies to move toward virtualisation is to get more out of their infrastructure and save on capex expenditure. They are being asked to not just cut costs, but also increase the services that they provide. But why should firms go for virtualisation? McAniff says, quoting a Forrester report that 70% of IT spend on maintenance and even in the post-recession period, IT managers are being asked to do more with less. The third step will be developing the software applications themselves.