Posted by Ramin Sayar
Vice President &
General Manager,
Cloud Infrastructure
& Management
Today, VMware announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire DynamicOps, Inc. (read VMware press release, read DynamicOps’ blog post). Headquartered in Burlington, MA, DynamicOps is a leader in the emerging market for cloud automation solutions that enable provisioning and management of IT services across heterogeneous environments.
I am personally thrilled about the acquisition and let me explain the reasons behind my excitement.
While VMware in the past has been primarily focused on helping customers realize the benefits of virtualization, our mission has progressively expanded. Today, we are dedicated to helping our customers in their journey to the cloud.
Our role in this journey until now has been to help our customers build and deliver Infrastructure as a Service offerings in their datacenters, often referred to as the private cloud. To this end we have significantly expanded our product portfolio with offerings such as: VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite which provides integrated health, capacity and configuration management of a cloud infrastructure; VMware vShield which provides secure multi-tenancy and isolation; and VMware vCloud Director which aggregates virtualized storage, server and network resources to create virtual datacenters (VDCs) that can be automatically instantiated, elastically scaled and consumed on demand. The foundation, of course, is VMware vSphere, used in over 80% of virtualization deployments and together we are able to provide the most comprehensive solution for an enterprise-class private cloud. This innovative cloud infrastructure and management solution has been rapidly adopted by well over a thousand customers and the majority of leading service providers to enable common management, compliance and security for the enterprise hybrid cloud in a very short time.
Cloud computing has brought a new responsibility for IT. Instead of being solely a builder of services, IT now has to be a broker of services and infrastructure capacity sourced either internally or rented from multiple external resources – vCloud partners as well as other IaaS providers like AWS. I often hear from a variety of customers that “Our developers are using AWS for its application platform capabilities, but we would like to use and manage other external clouds as well. However, there is no way for us to impose uniform governance, control, access and self-service over heterogeneous cloud services.”
This is obviously a critical and emerging requirement for customers, which is why Gartner refers to it as a ‘Service Governor.’ DynamicOps solves this challenge for IT. The combination of our current product portfolio and DynamicOps helps our customers with both aspects of their cloud journey – by providing a complete infrastructure stack to build a cloud as well as a comprehensive management solution that addresses the consumption of cloud resources in a uniform way.
A number of customers have told me that, while they have and will continue to standardize on vSphere for their production datacenters, they have a few pockets of other hypervisors for various reasons, and they are looking for a multi-hypervisor management solution. DynamicOps’s unique model-driven architecture enables our vSphere and infrastructure admins to easily model IT infrastructure services so that the same policy, governance, self-service management capabilities we provide for vSphere can be extended to other hypervisors, physical hardware and other cloud resources.
For customers that have built clouds using VMware vCloud Director, DynamicOps will provide a policy automation and integration layer that enables IT to not only map users and applications to the right virtual datacenters, but also delivers the ability to integrate the provisioning process into IT’s existing investments such as provisioning and orchestration tools, service desks and CMDBs in order to provide a single cloud storefront across heterogeneous infrastructure pools. DynamicOps’s powerful capabilities can be extended to model and deliver application services as well. For instance, with DynamicOps IT can deliver higher-level services such as Platform-as-a-Service, Database-as-a-Service, and Storage-as-a-Service in the same uniform way as delivering core compute services on demand.
DynamicOps is also very synergistic with a set of cross-cloud solutions that VMware has brought to market recently. For example, vFabric Application Director, released in February, is a cloud-enabled application provisioning solution that simplifies how developers and application architects create and standardize application deployments across diverse cloud services. DynamicOps will be integrated with Application Director to provide policy and governance for where and how such applications should be deployed.
Finally, our roadmap for DynamicOps will include integration with our IT Business Management (ITBM) solution. ITBM provides a business lens to IT activities including costs and service levels associated with different infrastructure pools and providers. The combination of ITBM and DynamicOps will provide CIOs with an even higher level of governance and control and further accelerate the benefits of cloud computing.
In summary, customers are looking to VMware as their trusted advisor and solutions provider to help them build and manage agile, cost-effective hybrid clouds. We don’t take this responsibility lightly. While this acquisition further strengthens VMware’s position as the infrastructure and management platform of choice for cloud computing, it’s another big step for VMware and our customers on the journey to cloud computing and ITaaS, one we’re delighted to be able to announce today.