Venyu Blog

According to VMWare CEO Paul Maritz, the desktop computer will soon be joining such marvels as PDAs, VCRs, fax machines and dial-up Internet on the junk heap of historical innovations. Or so he hopes.

Speaking at the recent kick-off of VMWorld 2011 in Las Vegas, Maritz suggested that within five years, less than 20 percent of computing clients will be running on Microsoft Windows, saying the job of providing applications and data “can no longer belong to any one device, or any one operating system; so we have to float away from that aspect of the desktop.”

In his remarks — which coincided with Venyu joining the VMWare Service Provider Program as a Premier-level member of the company’s vCloud Initiative that enables service and hosting providers to consume VMWare virtualization solutions in a way that aligns with their business models — Maritz encouraged customers to move from virtualization to a full-fledged cloud infrastructure. With fifty percent of the world’s infrastructure already running on virtualization, he noted, the cloud is the next logical step.

I found Maritz’s conclusions both grounded in reality and well-suited to the IT world of 2011 and beyond, most prominently his incisive observation that a cloud infrastructure is necessary to accommodate the needs of a more dynamic workforce, enabling administrators to deliver applications and information to people, rather than devices.

Citing historical events that culminated in the desktop PC, circa 1975, surrounded as it was by such trappings as file cabinets, typewriters, files, folders, inboxes and outboxes, Maritz concedes that the result was a “great desktop environment.” The problem, he suggests, is that a more youthful workforce doesn’t sit behind desks dealing with and tending to multiple documents. Instead, they are dealing with streams of information that come at them in much smaller chunks and much larger numbers, effectively moving the industry into a “new-post document era” requiring a different set of solutions.

Among them, he cited several VMWare innovations including solutions for developers to build applications that can run natively in the cloud (vFabric);  CloudFoundry, which provides a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that customers can use to run their own applications on external hardware and VMWare View VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) software that allows users to access their data and applications across a wide range of clients.

In his presentation Maritz also featured customers moving to virtualize their applications including the New York Stock Exchange Euronext stock exchange which runs about 2,300 virtual machines currently and Southwest Airlines which, over the past 18 months, has virtualized 40 percent of the applications it uses for providing online services with an ultimate goal of virtualizing all of its applications.

Compelling, heady outcomes that suggests a seachange in how users in the IT community build, support, consume and service applications. What do you think? Is Martiz right? Is this the death rattle of the PC? My reply, I suppose is a best guess: Only time will tell.