Everything announced at VMworld 2015 so far
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
At VMworld 2015, VMware is laying out the hybrid cloud direction it had sketched earlier that year with vSphere 6 and its Nvidia collaboration — positioning its infrastructure software as the bridge between customer datacenters and public clouds rather than a walled garden.
The arc matters because it sets up what came later in this coverage: the VMware-Amazon partnership to bring VMware's software to AWS starting in 2017, AWS's integrated partner program for it, and ultimately the live VMware-AWS integration with new SaaS products unveiled at a later VMworld.
First-order effects
- Enterprise customers evaluating hybrid cloud get a concrete roadmap anchored by vSphere 6 and GPU collaboration with Nvidia, rather than piecemeal product news.
- Microsoft's competing Azure push — including the G-Series virtual machines and management tooling added earlier in 2015 — forces VMware's announcements to be judged against a rival cloud scaling up on price and instance variety.
Second-order effects
- Public cloud providers' calculus shifts: instead of treating VMware estates as territory to migrate away from, AWS moves two years later to run VMware software natively, converting a competitor's installed base into hosted revenue.
- Hardware partners like Nvidia gain a distribution channel through VMware's virtualization layer, tying GPU demand to datacenter refresh cycles rather than standalone server sales.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the hypervisor vendor's moat migrates from owning the datacenter stack to being portable across clouds — a structural shift where VMware's relevance depends on partnership deals with the very clouds it once competed against.
- Hybrid cloud becomes the default enterprise architecture, pressuring every vendor to make on-premises and public-cloud operations interchangeable rather than forcing a migration choice.
The trend: Enterprise virtualization is moving from defending private datacenters against public cloud to embedding itself inside the big clouds as a managed service.