SINGAPORE--VMware is not losing sleep over Microsoft, but the large pool of companies that have not yet given up the "same old way" of doing business, according to a company executive.
Jeff Jennings, VMware's global vice president of products, said Thursday that the company views as its "biggest competitor" business inertia--companies that have not embarked on virtualization. Speaking at a media briefing held in conjunction with the Singapore leg of VMware's Virtualization Forum 2008, he pointed out that 93 percent of the market today remains untapped.
"If we get a hold [of that]--it's a piece of a really huge pie," he said.
To gear up for an increasingly Web- and user-centric environment, the virtualization specialist has put its focus on three areas: Virtual Datacenter Operating System, vCloud and vClient. It unveiled this focus at last month's VMworld 2008 conference held in Las Vegas.
While there was currently a "fair bit of uncertainty" in terms of market conditions, Jennings noted that businesses would likely be even more careful of how their budget will be utilized. While there may be concerns that large orders could be impacted, the post 9-11 period has proven that VMware could still grow by demonstrating its ability to create such an efficient environment that people felt using its technologies "was the right thing to do", he said.
In terms of appealing to the cost-conscious, added Jennings, VMware does not lag behind rival Microsoft. Explaining that the concept of affordability was a "very big misconception that Microsoft spent a lot of time spreading", he pointed out that the VMware ESXi is available free and a "very competitive product".
"I'm hard pressed to say they have a cheaper product than us," said Jennings, adding that VMware's offering would be easier on total cost of ownership, given factors such as smaller disk space utilization and the management of security patches.
According to Jim Lenox, general manager for Asia South at VMware, markets such as India and China have multiple sectors that are "experiencing hyper-growth". These businesses, he reported, are realizing that they're expanding so rapidly that there's no way they get scale up physically. The region, added Lenox, is growing at a more rapid pace than North America.
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