VMworld: IT departments must prepare for cloud-based future

COPENHAGEN: Cloud computing infrastructures are set to become the dominant way of providing IT services, with even the heaviest mission-critical workloads being moved to the cloud sooner or later, according to VMware chief executive Paul Maritz.

Maritz laid out this vision for the future of IT during his closing keynote at the VMworld European conference, repeating the firm's claim that over half of all x86 applications are now running on virtualised infrastructure, to demonstrate this is now a fully accepted way of providing IT services.

The challenges that remain involve taking the cost out of the infrastructure level for large enterprises, developing new applications unconstrained by the old client-server model, and enabling access to applications from a much broader range of endpoint devices, he argued.

"We've been through the mainframe era and the client-server era, and now with the cloud era, we're seeing the next phase of interaction with consumer technology starting to dominate the enterprise," Maritz explained.

But Maritz warned that cloud computing could easily lead to a new form of lock-in, with some IT companies offering a "one-stop shop" for customers based on an entirely vertically integrated cloud stack.

He said that VMware was attempting to address this with its Cloud Foundry project, an open-source platform-as-a-service layer that anyone could use to build cloud services upon, forming the "Linux of the cloud world", according to Maritz.

"Cloud Foundry is a layer that gives you application portability across cloud infrastructure platforms because you can stand it on top of Amazon or OpenStack as well as vSphere," he said.