With EVO, VMware is pitting the hardware vendors against each other for deals that will likely involve hundreds to thousands of nodes in large enterprises, and the competition will drive down hardware prices and therefore the overall price of the EVO solution. If hardware costs less than it might otherwise without such pressure, that extra margin can come from the software and support in the EVO stack. It’s rough being a hardware vendor.

Good, thorough piece from TPM on VMware’s OpenStack and Docker stuff this week, inc.: The lesson to be learned from this is that OpenStack is just a framework for how the components of a cloud are controlled, but it does not prescribe any particular component for compute, networking, storage, or management. Treating OpenStack like a spec, not a stack at #vmworld

As you may recall, I write about virtual desktop stuff from time-to-time. Teradici recently launched a new workstation remote access package for engineers and CAD/CAM types. My 451 report on the topic is out, co-authored with Scott Ottaway. Teradici is an interesting company in this space as they get most of their revenue (70-75%) from OEM’ing their PCoIP technology to the likes of VMware, Amazon, HP, and many others for embedded use in those OEM’ers products and services.

Gartner’s @cloudpundit has a great way of summing up VMware’s future-proofing problems when it comes to their strategy. tl;dr: they need to straddle two worlds, pre-cloud and post-cloud infrastructure. When VMware says “hybrid cloud,” that straddling of “legacy” IT and “real cloud” seems to be what they mean: That brings us to VMware (and many of the other traditional IT vendors who are trying to figure out what to do in an increasingly cloud-y world).

I am going to sound incredibly churlish here but why on earth Lionel Messi could possibly like our stuff is well beyond my imagination. Flattering though it might be. The same goes for the 20 year career short order cook who posts cat pictures, the retired person who joined Facebook last week, the nurse with a heavy religious bent. On and on it went. Long ago I tried some ads for RedMonk on Facebook.

Early on, vendors who wanted to compete with AWS would speak to the idea of an “enterprise cloud.” All the US Federal activity that AWS had been up to - including that $600m private cloud for the CIA - seems to nullify most of that. I think what will be more important is targeting the type of application supported: old school, three tier app that are statefull everywhere, or cloud native, microservices apps that are stateless (shoving statefullness of to caches and databases).

Smells like Agile in 2002: Your DevOps efforts will probably fail unless your entire management team buys into the required changes, and executives recognize that they’re going to have to change the way they operate, as well. Have fun storming the castle. Anecdotally, I hear fun tales of BigCo’s being befuddled by all the changes needed here. It shows why it’s vital to prove to The Business side that it’s worth it, which is always tough for such dramatic changes.

A summary of revenue: [HP’s] software division - IT Management, Application Development, Vertica, security and Autonomy - turned over $3.91bn in fiscal 2013 ended last November, down from $4.06bn in the previous year. With software, it’s good to focus on profits as well, as the margins are much higher. A common problem with large companies is getting cross-selling, inside and out of the company: “The biggest challenge for HP Software,” Youngjohns says, “is to get access to that broad range of HP partners and resellers, people selling systems and device solutions, to convince them software ought to be part of that proposition.