Of all of the keynotes and big stage presentations from EMC World 2011, my absolute favorite was the Tuesday morning session from VMWare CEO, Paul Maritz. I tried to tweet a few things but in the end decided that too much would be lost in 140 character snippets.

I remember seeing a VMWare presentation about three years ago, maybe four, probably at an EMC World but I don’t remember exactly. After the presentation, in which they presented a pretty weak view of the future of VMWare, I figured they had peaked. Microsoft was making a hypervisor now and it sure looked like VMWare’s bread and butter was being commoditized. It’s clear now that I couldn’t have been more wrong. VMWare is still on the top. They have great products, they have made some fantastic acquisitions (Spring Source!) and have a very strong vision for the future.

The overall theme of the session was about the transformations we are seeing across the entire information technology landscape. Paul talked about transformations happening at the infrastructure level, at the application level and at the user interface level. My aim with this post isn’t to summarize all that he presented, I couldn’t possibly hope to do justice to Paul’s outstanding talk, rather, I want to share with you a couple of insights that really caught my attention. Sound bites if you will.The first is the 1,000,000 foot view of the VMWare future: the hypervisor is, in fact, commoditized, and that is perfectly okay with VMWare. They give the hypervisor away for free (something that delights the likes of me when I want to use it for personal use) – so you see, it’s not their bread and butter anymore. What makes VMWare a viable business are the services that are put around virtualized resources. It’s the ability for virtualization to solve the restart problem for long running computation-intensive loads. It’s the ability to move around workloads, even while they are in-flight, that allows server consolidation. It’s the ability provide fault tolerance with a checkbox. It’s all in the services baby!

I’m not usually a process person, if you know me, you know I am a self-proclaimed “propeller-head,” but something Paul talked about resonated with me. He said that virtualization allows us to measure IT resources in a way that we couldn’t do before. Yeah, cloud-motherhood and apple pie. But the spin he put on it was that this measurability isn’t only used to assess the effectiveness of your IT department but, is also used to hold the IT customer accountable for what they are asking for. Have any of you ever asked IT for something and then never used it? Guilty. If we have to pay for it (which we can only do if it is measurable), then we will surely be more careful with our request, ultimately making the company as a whole function more effectively. Okay, so enough of me dabbling in business concerns. 😉

Perhaps my favorite sound bite from the session was when Paul moved from talking about infrastructure to talking about applications. He was lamenting the design of modern programming languages, complaining, at first, that languages like Ruby are extraordinarily hard to compile and optimize. But then he acknowledged that with the level of power in the machinery we have today, that the time has come for the machines to do the heavy lifting, rather than the developer. Maybe, with these new programming languages we allow the developer to be more productive, or perhaps , we open up programming to a broader cross section of the population with a more accessible programming experience. Instead of giving developers a toolset so they can build things designed to execute efficiently on the computer, we give them a toolset designed to make them more efficient and let the computer do the hard work. Yeah! That time has come.

Finally, the last tidbit I want to share starts with Paul recalling that beginning in the 1970s with Xerox Parc, and continuing into the 80s and 90s at places like Microsoft, a fundamental focus was on automating the physical desktop. When they looked at the physical desktop it had things on it like documents, file folders and inboxes and this is why you see these abstractions in computer systems today; heck, the name of my former company, Documentum, makes that very clear. The insight Paul shared is that the tasks that individuals are doing today are decreasingly document-based and are increasingly stream-based. We take in streams, modify them, combine them with other streams and generate new streams. While that insight isn’t earth shattering (though it is, perhaps, a bit subtle), when I think about what we as an industry need to do to adapt to that transformation, well, it’s daunting. When I think about programming models, for example, document abstractions are deeply ingrained (XML D(ocument)OM, HTML DOM, etc.). I remember a time when explaining the folder metaphor to a non-computer user was hard. Decades of training and use have cemented those notions not only into the toolsets but also into our subconscious and now we need to change that. Bring it – I’m up for it!!