The VMware and DynamicOps marriage

On July 2nd VMware announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DynamicOps. For a company that ties its cloud management opportunity to data center infrastructure opportunity and believes that its greater, nearer-term challenge will probably come from Microsoft because it views cloud solutions such as OpenStack as being relatively immature compared to vSphere, this is a positive move.

So what does the DynamicOps acquisition do for VMware?

Heterogenous platform solution? Yes DynamicOps supports physical environments, vSphere, Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2. And the acquisition allows VMware the ability to reach out to customers that have not standardized on vSphere. But management solutions only account for about 10% of overall license bookings and associate closely with ELAs rather than channel or direct sales. End-user computing group accounts for another 10% of overall license bookings. Bulk of the revenue still comes from vSphere. Thus VMware is not about to promote anything but vSphere anytime soon. And may even try to convert these heterogenous shops to VMware once it gets an entry with DynamicOps.

The acquisition is less about supporting multiple hypervisors and more about VMware recognizing that while it has it eyes on Microsoft right now in the long term, their toughest competition will come from new avenues and the solutions they have today will not be competitive. Thus Paul Maritz noted in the 1st quarter earnings call “We certainly take all of the competing cloud technologies very seriously and spend a lot of time thinking about them, analyzing them. And it’s for that reason that we’re constructing the series of investments that we’ll be bringing to market this year and in the subsequent years.”

DynamicOps fits nicely within the VMware management portfolio. VMware splits it into 3 areas – Infrastructure and Operations Management, Application management and IT Business Management. VMware has plans for DynamicOps in all three areas, primarily around policy automation and governance.

And what does the acquisition mean for other vendors and end consumers?

VMware is growing up, charting its course from a hypervisor vendor to a virtualization management vendor to a cloud management vendor. Legacy vendors will notice that competition just got stronger and they need to innovate and move the ball forward. For end consumers, more competition amongst vendors is always beneficial.