Cloud Panel: Life After VMware and the Future of Open Source
So, we should start. Hi everyone, welcome and thank you for joining us today for this very special online panel. We are going to discuss the most pressing questions about the biggest topic in Cloud IT and those will be the changes to VMware licensing and bundling with the Broadcom acquisition. We want to discuss how it affects us as technology partners, as business owners, as cloud service providers, and so on. So, the focus will be the future of your business. How
it affects your business, how it impacts the IT strategies for companies that are buying and selling cloud. And of course, how any of those changes have created an even more pressing need for solutions that are based on Open-Source technologies? My name is Rony Moyal, I'm your host from Virtuozzo. We are joined today by three very special guests. We have not in alphabetical order we have Tim Timrawi founder and CEO of Sharktech. Tim raise your hand. Hey. We have Cliff Greenberg founder and CEO of Livewire and Jimmy McArthur Director of Business Development at Open Infra at the Open Infra Foundation. Before I let my panel introduce themselves some house clearing.
In this panel, we will answer questions that were pre-submitted but feel free to send us additional questions using the QA tool in Zoom if you want. We can point you to where it is. If there are still open questions after the panel. Please share them with us, we will follow up by email later on. One last thing before we begin this session will be recorded, so you'll be noticed. We will share the link of the recording to anyone that was registered to the panel feel free to share it with whomever was not registered but still need the link for this recording. Okay, so we'll get
started. Let me see kind of where we are. So, we are at 62 participants I think it shows the level of interest in those changes, the level of I would say frustration and opportunity in those changes. So, I'll introduce Cliff followed by Jimmy and Tim. Cliff give us a few words about you. My name is Cliff Greenberg. I'm the CEO and founder of Live Wire Cloud we're an MSP-centric cloud service provider providing open-stack, proxmox, and VMware virtualization technologies in a private Cloud configuration specifically to the MSP community, so we have probably a very different perspective than the other panelists based on who our end user community is. Yep. Very diverse and a longtime partner of Virtuozzo as well followed by Jimmy. Yes, Jimmy McArthur with the Open-Infra
Foundation. I do business development for the foundation. I've been here about eight years and my goal is to spend every day talking to folks around the world that are using open-stack and using open- infrastructure software and see how the foundation can be of assistance. Thank you, and Tim. Hi, my name is Tim Timrawi. I'm the founder and CEO of Sharktech. We are a hosting provider we've been in business for the past 20 years. We started with infrastructure as a service provider with DDoS protection and we moved into the Cloud solution provider and now we provide the public Cloud solution services, and bare metal services, and private Cloud. Thank you very much, Tim. So, with that we do have a few questions that we want to cover, or the discussion will
have some core questions that we want to answer, and the first question I want to kind of hand it off to Cliff. Since I know your background, I know the type of solutions that you've supported. What are the main pain points that you've seen from customers and partners of yours with the changes in with Broadcom and VMware and the bundling and prices? Well, specifically I think the biggest pain is the new pricing architecture and the degree with which Broadcom came into the picture and put aggressive time frames into the modification of the licensure structure. So yester year before the Broadcom merger everything was based on you know vSAN size of pools and memory allocation and had nothing to do with core count or CPU, and today everything is based on core count within each server. Initially there was only a
single VMware partner tier, and I think one of the biggest modifications is some existing partners weren't even able to become resellers. They were ejected from the community altogether and the ones that made reseller status had to go and find a premier partner to procure their licenses from, so that's a very awkward go buy your licenses from your competitor because you're unable to meet the financial milestones created by VMware and then of course the aggressiveness with which the program was adopted and the lack of communication across the industry when is my stuff going to stop working? Is you know, are they going to honor my current, you know, subscription program after the merger? So lots of questions very few answers then a lot of push back and then to throw insult to injury they announced that they're selling off the end-user community computing division to KKR, so the VMware horizon is now an additional quandary on top of you know your traditional Vcloud director and Vsphere infrastructure solutions. So a lot of pain for a lot of people I think the only saving grace is they introduced another tier to the partner communities that is a little bit more cost-effective but it's caused people to think dramatically about whether or not they're with the correct solution and many people aren't going to be able to afford the new pricing structure.
And then Amazon was removed as one of the premier partners, so we're going to see a lot of changes with respect to the way VMware is adopted and who is using it and how. Thank you. Tim, you want to give us your perspective. Yeah, I think it's a situation of the people that are developing the software are disconnected from the people that are administering the software and managing the systems. There seems to be, it is a complex system. The people that are administering it are realizing that we're you know being stuck with solutions that they might change on a dime based on different corporate interests and we are left hanging there trying to decipher complex solutions and complex alternatives instead of you know focusing on the business core, which is providing the service to our customers and making sure that our infrastructure is ready and available for our customers or our businesses. It's been difficult because VMware has been a trademark you know system for the past couple of decades at least and everybody seems to have you know reached a point where we're relaxed with the system. It is, I hope, going to be an eye-opener and able to help
the community recognize where what is best for us to move forward without being dependent on single entities like VMware. Do you see those changes in cost structure being rolled over to the customer 100% or being absorbed by the cloud service provider? The cloud service providers are already, you know, it's very complex time for us right now and I am definitely sure that whoever is going to be succeeding and adopting or understanding the new pricing structures. There it's going to be sent back to the customers whoever decides to go into this the problem then is who is going to be on the other side right who is going to be ending up recognizing that hey we need to change and investing their time and resources in finding alternative solutions and recognizing the cost effectiveness of the other solutions and seeing that okay we're going to be able to compete and that's a beautiful thing about you know CSP’s right now. We are still a competitive market obviously for us, not the top three providers, we are still a competitive market and finding ways to provide a unique cost-effective solution and strong solution is still very important. We do get
some feedback from other markets, so the Americas the margins are as such that you know some will be rolled to the customers. From our perspective some will be staying within the CSP, so the margin will shrink a little bit but there is enough to sustain or for VMware to still be relevant, but we do see in other global markets where VMware was priced as such that it was just barely sufficient for the CSP to make any margin because the customers will not be able to pay more than what they were paying and with the changes it kind of prices itself out of the reach of customers even government entities. Do you guys see that happening here if you know whoever decides to stay with VMware? I think I can answer that to some degree. I really believe it depends on how you run your
business to some extent. And Capex versus Opex models and most people have adopted cloud in an effort to move to a more Opex pay-as-you-go type of situation, to be able to scale up and scale down, and to afford themselves the ability to maintain certain degrees of profitability through this relationship with the cloud vendors. And so much of that is being destroyed to some extent by VMware's aggressive adoption of three-year commitments as being the only mechanism to bring your costs to a reasonable level and so. Also paying for the full capacity upfront,
so it's not pay-as you-go, it's commit to the full capacity of your data center correct, so that first tier of a partnership the premier tier is 3,500 cores minimum 16 cores per server. You can imagine we started to look at well what if we took a processor out of the server you know and had to start rethinking everything from that perspective to try to create cost-effective models for our MSP partners. And when you do that you degrade the servers performance and the server ability to support other infrastructure such as memory, and disk, and PCI bus, and I mean there's so many affiliated ramifications ripple effect down the road, so today we're seeing like on a pay as you go models no less than $35 a core per month minimum 16 core per servers so a single server is almost $500 a month in VMware or lure at our cost under a pay as you go model and that's a dramatic increase over the prior licensure model where CPU wasn't relevant at all in the VSCPP solution provider space. So in a way it does play to the hyperscalers because it kind of shrinks the benefit of Opex versus you know hyperscalers, so correct if it was 30% or more reduction in cost it shrinks that and it does call for alternative for CSP’s to be able to maintain reduce the cost and stay on the pay as you grow versus buy the capacity and hope you can sell it correct and then you know over subscription was a possibility way back when but now none of that is doable to some extent and neither is the shrinkage model like what happens if you have to lay off people you're still stuck in this cost center at the resource pool that you committed to so that's a difficult position to put yourself in. Yep. Okay we'll move to the next question and I'll start with Jimmy this time do you think that this do you think that this has created a turning point for adoption of Open Source based C so from all we heard in question number one Jimmy you see that as a motivation for CSP’ss for partners for customers Enterprise customers to adopt open source or open-stack? Yeah I think Tim put it best which is you know it's eyes open a bit this year and I think you know 2024 is the year we all learned a valuable lesson which is proprietary and single vendor open source software single vendor open source software it makes your business vulnerable right and I hope what we take away from the end of the year is that multivendor open- Source projects with a healthy ecosystem are the way forward you know the question about you know locking in prices with VMware for three years you know CSP’s have to scale up their entire infrastructure based on what their customer base looks like right and if you lose one of those but you're still paying for all that infrastructure for with a VMware license you're out of business and so you know you you've got to look at Alternatives you've got to look at open-source alternatives and in my opinion I think open sack is the way forward you know it's if you combine open-stack and the situation with VMware with other trends in the market like privacy and data sovereignty and what we're seeing with the need for greater compute power for AI workloads open-stack is a natural fit for that kind of thing and I think you know VMware for better or worse has sent a message to the to the industry and I hope everybody learns something from it. Jimmy you really like took the words out of my mouth on that one. I really hope so I hope we as a community start recognizing the difficult positions we're
putting ourselves in taking the easy way forward. It is a problem and I hope we recognize this as a problem and see alternative ways forward. What you brought in with the AI situation is very important do you want to end up in a position where you are locked where you are unable to innovate on your own when a new technology comes in? Do you want to be in a position where you are dependent on a close po Source kind of VMware solution that will end up put you in a position well I have to wait for them to develop this solution for GPU for example, or I can work with I can work on the open-stack solution that we have developed in a unique way to provide this type of service cost wise I mean if you are in a CSP service and you see the price models that Cliff shared with us and you think that this is okay I'm really happy for you this is just not how our industry works and this tells you the disconnect that VMware has with the industry this is just not how our business models ever work we are very scalable we go up all the time we hopefully never go down, but you know sometimes we have to be careful about when we have to go down right we have to scale down we have to be cognizant about what should we be doing when we have to scale down in those kind of scenarios and how difficult it is to scale up and scale down and the pricing model which really puts us at a disadvantage this is something to be taken seriously. Yeah. Thank you guys Cliff anything to add on this question? I think I'm going to pass on this one because I for Bose with the other ones but I will have stuff to contribute later I promise I'm sure okay so we have our next kind of item to discuss is considering the current 2024 state of the economy and the it Trends in general how does open-stack open source provide a way forward to the business so we answered some of it but Jimmy I want you to elaborate a little bit more on that. Yeah, sure and I mean open-stack is a cloud computing platform that provides infrastructure as a service whereas you know Vsphere is a virtualization platform and it's been a fine solution for a lot of folks for a long time but if it's not cost effective you've got to start looking around and I think further you know in this day and age you should be going cloud native. It's kind of the natural way of things right now
and avoiding vendor lock in you know you look no further than you know obviously VMware, but also what recently happened with Hashi Corp like we're in a situation where you know you've got to be looking at open source and in the same way that you would like Linux is the defacto open-source OS like why would you look at anything else I mean Linux won and I think I hope we look back and see that everybody has moved on to proper open source solutions for their infrastructure as well. Thank you. Tim you want to add to that? Yes, that's also again Jimmy that's a great point so you know when we started with Linux long time ago and FreeBSD and all of those we recognized the open solution that it provided when now we have reached the point where we are looking for something that orchestrates multiple systems at the same time with infrastructure of networks servers storage nodes and all of that and we have reached a new layer in systems management open-stack is key on that the same as Linux was for operating systems our ability to innovate on open-stack is similar to how we were able to innovate back in the day on FreeBSD on Linux on open BSD without you know the support of without the FreeBSD for example Sharktech would not have existed in 2002 when we when we took on dos protection as a service as the first company that actually provided that. And now we're doing the exact same thing and we're really excited and for the first time you know in over a decade we our my team has been absolutely enlightened and happy that we are able to actually innovate again and we are able to create unique solutions that puts us out there on a different level and yes partnering up with companies and now I'm going to put the plug for Virtuozzo. Partnering with companies like Virtuozzo that have dedicated themselves to creating solutions that are that makes the adoption of open-stack possible is an important step so open-stack as many know okay it's not easy it's getting easier it's getting better but you definitely need guard rails you definitely need help moving forward with it and this is when we went with we decided for years ago to go with Virtuozzo and Virtuozzo has been that for us the solution that they have created based on open-stack has been tremendously helpful for us it provided us the path forward and the opportunity for us. I would add to that Tim that there are a number of distributions
out there Virtuozzo being one of them and for folks that do need those guard rails that's the beauty of open-stack right their distributions their Enterprise grade you can set it up and you can have the kind of service that you might have expected from VMware back in the day but there's also you know just pure open-source vanilla open-stack and for those folks that are capable and are interested you can also set up and run a data center with a few engineers you know it doesn't there's this idea that open-stack is so complicated and so hard that you've got to have this team of 20 or 30 people to manage it and 20 or 30 people to set it up, but that's just not reality anymore. No, that's a decade ago. Yeah, right. Absolutely, so a commercialized way I think that Virtuozzo and few other ones we're not only one in the market there are aspects source that you need to commercialize and commercialization of a product is not in the nature of Open-Source, open-stack it's more about open it's here is the kind of the source code here are the tools to create your own cake just and if somebody is taking all those great ingredients and making something that is easy for you to go to market and reduce your operation cost because you need smaller team you can focus on selling to customers collecting from customers I think there's a service for the likes of Virtuozzo and again we're not alone there that commercializing open-stack open source. Absolutely, so one sec like Jimmy about that so basically we were able to create a billable hourly rate system a Cloud solution, a virtual data center environment for our customers and build them on resources used on hourly basis basically utilizing the Virtuozzo tools and open-stack for our customers, so this has allowed us to bring it on to the commercial side significantly easier than we have if you ever have gone straight out to open-stack and develop and took the time to actually develop the system directly ourselves. You know, right now we are at the point where it's a double it's a couple of clicks on our website and you're done you have an open Cloud, open-stack solution developed and provided to you as a customer and you go with it, and this is amazing. I don't think we would have been able to do that without the support of Virtuozzo or open-stack. Thank you. Yeah, I think I have a slightly different perspective Ronnie than the other guys. I mean for me, I view VMware as a virtualization technology,
but not a multi-tenant Cloud infrastructure solution and VMware doesn't scale massively. It can certainly scale in a hyper converge configuration to some extent but nowhere near the capability and the ability to introduce heterogeneous hardware into the stack. VMware cannot do that and so this is one of the biggest differentiators between open-stack and VMware.
Open-stack is a multi-tenant multi-tiered solution with wonderfully written SDKs and you guys help provide those and the proper API interfaces for it to do it, but the biggest difference is open-stack scales massively and just gets stronger and more stable as you do so in better performance better everything. Tiers of discs I think the biggest challenge is it's not open to every other technology out there so there's going to be technology adoption that are going to influence some of your strategic decisions in terms of embracing a virtualization environment right if you have expertise. I don't think it's part of the service quotation that VMware is doing to open open-stack the disruption will cause more of the ecosystem providers to reconsider open-stack to be part of open-stack to augment open-stack rather than focusing on a company that have an interest to grow which is fine, but have an interest to have captive audience and to do that you make sure that you are able to sell them Vista you are able to sell them products that are working in your closed garden which is all fine because this is the motivation of the company that's why they were brought by bought by Broadcom, but if you if you bring open source open-stack into that it's a more noble approach because it's not about serving one market segment it's not about serving the need or of the you know the investors of Broadcom; it's more about serving the community and if you take the flavor of open-stack that you need and commercialize it correctly you answer more use cases than the one that are driven by your investors. Honestly I don't know why Broadcom bought VMware but, that's well the only reason a chip manufacturer with buy virtualization technology is if they want to embed the technology into the Chip and latest release this is Broadcom might buy Intel which that one blew my mind so that's the latest press release that I read the other day see I could I could see that like I could see that fitting more the Broadcom mentality like I could see them buying Cisco for example maybe that's like that makes sense. Buying VMware has never been it never made sense to me it's but then again it happened and doesn't need to make sense to anyone, I guess. Time will tell time will tell. So actually, that leads us to the next has been telling do you think that Broadcom VMware changes have created lasting distrust in the real stability of established platform this is I hope so perfect segue to that so well I would to. Oh,
it's Tims turn? Okay good Tim I really I really hope so you know I'm I really hope that it's we're reaching the point that we're starting to recognize how important it is to be cognizant of the systems that we're using and who is behind those systems and knowing that you know building a system that requires specialty hardware specialty software and being dependent on those and then saying oh yeah now they're scaling up the price on us and then increasing the prices on us and then we're like we're left with a with a situation that we simply cannot afford because they do not recognize the type of businesses and the models that we are providing that's a big problem and I hope we have reach the point that you know we learned our lesson and we're starting to look seriously at open-stack as we did for Linux back 20 years ago. Okay and Cliff your chance. I think that you know past behavior is a wonderful indicator of what your future behavior is going to be and if we look at Broadcom's past behaviors and the companies that they bought dismantled and practically destroyed for a piece of technology that they were interested in and the list is fairly lengthy you know computer associates is the one that comes to my mind initially, but all of that all those products have you know evaporated from our technology from the technology ethers. So, I think the motivating factors of an organization like Broadcom are kept very close to the heart and it's not going to be divulged to us and we're not in sync with them. The communities that support and provide these services have different motivating decision-making ideas and concepts about providing you know infrastructure as a service and another we are not aligned with the vendor in our goals and that's the biggest challenge and I think we were previously aligned with VMware. I think they recognize their own strengths to some extent but now I have zero confidence in the future direction of the product and we're already seeing them tear it apart even further and I think I think they missed the boat in some regard a Tanzu to run Kubernetes and Docker containers within VMware was a joke I mean I don't know anybody that embraced it or used it, but here's another big differentiator with regards to open-stack it natively supports you know containers and microservices, which we all agree is you know is the serverless way of the future. Right? And so if you don't have a technology platform that can support future
solutions that are eminent and being developed every day then people aren't going to have a choice but to jump ship and find something that works to meet their needs at the end of the day. I absolutely agree with that go ahead no I was just gonna say it's you know as I mentioned earlier if you want to go cloud native open sack is the way to go and you know what we're seeing and what we see with our users is everyone's running workloads they're running Kubernetes on top of open-stack it's a natural fit and you know who's not running Kubernetes these days and I think you know that's just the way of the future and you know unfortunately I think you know it's a sad tale about VMware but I think it's an opportunity for open source communities to embrace a bunch of new users and show people that it's the right way to move your business forward. Okay now with that do you see any other leading technologies that kind of on the precipice of being bought, sold, changing their kind of DNA is it is it so you know I don't want to name names but there are few other technology is around virtualization that have kind of the same approach you know proprietary hardware closed garden do you see this wave of companies being bought changing their DNA, moving from focus where the a customer partner being the focus to let's turn it into a cash machine? This is the way these days, unfortunately, you know. There's a lot of investors out there there's a lot of business opportunities out there that they're looking at a well-established software development companies to take them on to take them on and basically take on customers that are already locked in a solution and taking advantage of it for as much for as long as they can for as much as they can it's unfortunately we're seeing it and it's not only in you know virtualization platforms it's in a lot of software as a service providers situation and a lot of customers are ending up being locked in these situations with really even when they have an alternative it's extremely difficult to see it because they are so busy with the current situation that they are in that it's difficult for them to see alternatives. Yeah, and I think it's also I was going to say I think it's
important to understand why multivendor open-source projects in a healthy community around an open source project is the most important thing when choosing an open source project or choosing software. You know proprietary is one thing but when you have a single vendor open source project that switches the license on the Fly and all of a sudden you're just as locked in as you would have been with VMware that's bad as well and so you know companies that are kind of this is why in my opinion you know companies that are kind of masquerading as open-source but they're really not they don't have an ecosystem built around it they don't have other partners and organizations committing to that open-source project and keeping it healthy then you're going to run into that problem and you know this is the reason that pure open-source is the best way to manage to make software decisions. So, Jimmy, your best advice to any partner that is looking to move from VMware to any other solution is don't make the same mistake twice. Don't jump from one closed garden to
another closed garden to from one company that was ripe to be sold to another company that is ripe to be sold with a closed garden. That is absolutely my position, and I would say also like there's you know people kept VMware because it had first of all it was around forever you know as Cliff points out there's a big ecosystem around it. I think those things and that security of having the service contract and things like that those things exist with open-source projects it exists with open-stack you know there's a large ecosystem around open-stack that does things like backup, monitoring, metering storage, you know data recovery those things all exist, but it hasn't been at the forefront of a lot of those organizations that they haven't been pushing it because open-stack for lack of a better word has a tough reputation and it's something that we at the open infer foundation and we with our ecosystem partners are really trying to overcome and I hope that this is an opportunity for people to see that this is a safe place to put your workloads. Open-stack is a safe place and it's a great place for you to run your infrastructure so hopefully that message gets through. Yeah, I'm in agreement with Tim. I mean I think our job as cloud service providers is to educate our potential customers on the capabilities and the best practices to embrace Open-source technology and I think security is tantamount to any solution that's out there and I have to tell you that the virtuoso open-stack is hardened and has withstood the test of time with respect to vulnerability and assault and even though you can layer additional security on top of it you know that is a really important component to providing cloud services. I can tell you that the moment you're exposed and have compromised customers, yeah that's a very bad day for everybody. Absolutely Cliff I'd like to add on to that I mean
this is the most important part right there for us you know security is a multi-layered approach security is being able to use independent systems to protect each other to create a layered approach into security using something like open-stack we are able to utilize you know third-party software third party firewalls appliances in front of these systems to protect them to analyze the data going to them and they are completely independent of our open-stack environments right and we are able to say okay this is something that right here so in case of any vulnerability that's going to happen in the stack it is segmented and we create we create basically air gap situations where we are able to address the issues and this is we are able to do that with open-stack solutions right we're able with open-source solutions we are actually able to create unique solutions that us the ones in the trenches are seeing and recognizing and we do not have to go back write a recommendation to a VMware that in all likelihood is not going to align with their business models or something they're going to be like, oh yeah we can create a new system to add on top of this because hey that's another revenue stream for us. No, we are able to work with the open-source community, we are able to develop our own solutions and bring it in and be a unique solution provider out there as well. Now quick question. So, the wave of customers who are looking for alternative to VMware start somewhere around November 2023 with the changes being announced a little bit before but kind of the big wave the front of the wave was November till today. Do you see the community of VMware customers or partners that are looking for alternative. Is it ending? Is it in the midst
of it? is it depending on where your contract is done when you need the hardware refresh what's the feel? I think I can take that one I think the big fear was what's going to happen on like I think it was originally April 4th is when you know the transaction concluded and supposedly the former licensure was completely supposed to be coming null and void. A number of European organizations got together and started a class action against VMware and they really ruffled the waters and then VMware started to backpedal a little bit and started pushing out deadlines, so far we haven't seen anything be rendered un-operational so we're not seeing license revocation or anything ugly like that so I think that the I think they're going to leave it alone and I would recommend that they leave it alone and let people do the appropriate level of due diligence on alternative solutions if cost is the you know driving factor behind the change that they want to see coming forward. And then they created, I didn't get to mention this before they created the Vsphere Foundation licensure program which is a much less expensive tier to the cloud foundation tier of licensure. And so there's still a very a lot of questions in the air as to where you can adopt
each one of these two license programs and how you can use them and who's allowed to use them and so on and so forth I think much of those questions are still trying to be unraveled from the licensed providers. And remember now you're going to a premier provider who has to go to VMware or to a tier above him and then, so they VMware pushed or Broadcom pushed all of the support down to the partner community that is a major modification to what they were doing before and hence you've seen huge layups within the organization and I think that's just going to be their demise to be honest with you because what compelling reason does my competitor have to properly support me or provide the correct answers to remedy a problem when you know. I think it's a preposterous design in the first place. But I it was a stop gap it wasn't meant to be to start with they created a vacuum and then they figure out okay there's a big vacuum what do we do in the meantime before we do the real thing and then they put those aggregators or in between tier just to help, I wouldn't call it to help, but to help themselves prevent even bigger erosion. Do you guys see it the same way? Yeah, I think going back to your original question Rony, I think that you know we're the start of the wave VMware has for 45% market share and you know we're seeing interest from every company that we talk to and in fact we recently pulled our member companies and 82% of them have already received interest from organizations seeking a VMware alternative and 61% of them have already migrated VMware customers to open-stack and we're seeing interest globally that's 13 countries in five continents and I think you know we're at a spot here where we're going to see massive interest coming in the through the rest of 2024 if not 2025, that's my opinion. It's definitely I think it's the time of the opportunity right like the time for opportunity for people that are looking, recognizing what going on and deciding okay this maybe is the time for us to take action the earlier you are and this the better you are positioned in the market and the better that you are at adopting this technology and benefit your benefiting your business. Yeah,
okay thank you guys very much we do have few questions from the audience if you don't mind I'll go through them and we'll try to answer them again if anybody at the audience have more questions please feel free to post them if we want to have time to answer all of them we will answer them via email. So VMware has been a market leader in virtualization this is a question that we got earlier today VMware has been a market leader in virtualization for nearly two decades and it integrates with many other software and hardware products how long will it take open source community to replicate the features functionality? Jimmy, sorry Cliff you want to start? Sorry I was typing an answer could you repeat that question? fare has been the market leader in virtualization for nearly two decades and it integrates with many other software and Hardware products how long will it take open source to replicate? So that's a tough one right this is all about which vendors want to hang their hat on a cart right and this was what I was inferring to before in our world, managed service provider world, as it professionals we hook ourselves to various carts and create tool sets that we educate our team members on and invest time and energy in embracing and learning and optimizing and using those tools to the benefit of our and user customers, right. And so when you make those investments in tertiary products that are married to your virtualization technologies you're you’ve locked yourself in to some extent there monetarily and so it's got to be us who drive the change and put the requests out to the Veeams of the world and Zertos and you know whatever other you know tertiary add-on third-party technology you've adopted RMM and PSA tools and other things I mean at the end of the day we have to continue to support our end user requirements and make sure that their stuff is rock solid and safeguarded and the virtualization technology shouldn't really be the biggest component in that decision-making process right because at the end of the day, I think reliability is your number one. Reliability and security are your number one considerations and I would add scalability to that. I agree except
that the S&P Marketplace is typically a smaller ecosystem and so scalability from that perspective isn't as important to the end user. There are Enterprise grade solutions out there that need massively scalable Solutions and yes Virtuozzo open-stack has the ability to scale to thousands of nodes and there is hardly any other products out there today that can accomplish that objective so do you thank you Cliff do you see the pressure building up on the likes of VM Zerto and others to adopt open source as a venue for their products? Where if we look at Vim for example they were very much locked into VMware they had no interest they actually actively pushed back on adopting open-source or being open to open-source do we see pressure mounting on those companies to adapt open source to open themselves to open-stack? It's a business you know I mean at the end of the day it's a business right is it in your business interest as VM to actually have an open-source solution and to what end is that are you going to end up closing that open source solution eventually we've seen that happen before on Linux as well it's at the end of the day it's a business so if you're going for that I hope you that your trust is put in the right place here because at the end of the day it's a business model. Yeah, that's very concerning. Dirty secret VM actually has open-stack backup, so just for the record its they just don't talk about it but… Well they do have it but it's agent based not agentless so to for 100% replication of what they've done with VMware if there were would have been 100% replication into open stack I think that it will allow them to maintain their market domination if not they will lose a lot of customers yes. I mean I think that's the way the market's going and it that's to Cliff's point is it's these companies are going to have to adapt right as open sack adoption increases I would like to address your original point though Rony about like how long does it take to replicate these features for open-source? And I would argue that open-stack is already there you know there it's not maybe it's not agentless beam but there are backup solutions there are recovery solutions there are storage solutions monitoring solutions like that's all this all exists and in fact open sectors had its 29th on time release built by more than 70 organizations. I would say that that open-stack is as rock solid and flexible and nimble as and if not more so than VM wherever was. You know it's I wouldn't say that it's because or it's for
any lack in open stack it's a just a commercial business decision by the likes of him and others that they want to be able to maintain their close garden relationship with VMware but now where this garden is kind of breached and customers are running away do you want to lose this market share just because of convenience I or do you want to open yourself up? For sure open-stack have all the features to bring in the likes of women to enable their functionality on open stack, but it takes two to Tango in this case we have another question does open stack have a bright future after red hat gives up supporting it in favor of open shift? Jimmy, I think I'll hand it to you. Sure, so first would say that you know as I mentioned open-stack is mature and fully baked and we've got a broad ecosystem with the support of over 700 organizations and a community of 110,000 people that are working on looking at using part of the ecosystem. It's not just red hat that is part of open-stack now red hat played a big part in it sure but so have organizations like over the years Rackspace, Intel, Vex host. I mean the amount of contributors and the amount of
organizations that have been a part of building the open-stack software is huge I would also add open shift runs on open-stack or at least open shift can't run without open-stack so it's to me that's kind of a non- question, but I get that that's the market perception that yeah and also I think open-stack reached a momentum and a critical mass that is self- sustained so it does require a lot of support from other technology providers, but it can diversify with technology it can grow on its own inertia. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, we are about four minutes to the hour and we have plenty of questions so we'll answer the rest of the questions and the ones that are in the webinar itself via email via communication that we will send to you. With that I would like to thank my panelist partners panelists for their time and the audience of course thank you for taking an hour from your time and joining us. We had at the top we had about 76 participants from across the world. That's quite surprising. I know that it's not a very comfortable hour in a lot of other time zones, so thank you all for joining us and we will try to make more of those webinars to kind of educate on the progress of open-stack and how we can commercialize and drive a better adoption of open-stack to the customer needs. Thank you guys. Thank you. Thank you everyone.
2025-01-02 23:52
