Analyst: VMware will find SMBs tough

An IDC analyst has played down VMware’s new VMware Go solution for SMBs, claiming it may not make its intended splash in the market.

The virtualisation vendor’s latest offering comes with a Web-based interface and a wizard to guide the SMB through installation and set-up. From there, users can create virtual machines and exercise basic management tasks on those machines and ESXi servers.

IDC program manager for IT spending, Jean Marc Annonier, claimed the solution, although free of charge, wasn’t offering enough to help SMBs adopt the technology. The lack of handholding from VMware meant many smaller organisations, which lacked technical and infrastructure capabilities around virtualisation, would need to call in a managed services provider and hardware, leaving him unconvinced of its viability.

“I see it as targeting Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform, which SMBs can easily access,” Annonier said. “The challenge for the ESXi platform is that it is a very big operating system with some heavy hardware requirements many SMBs won’t have, making it hard for their administrators to test the technology.

“ESXi is a good product that has been available for a long time, and it has enjoyed good market penetration, but with the larger organisations, not so much the smaller ones.”

While agreeing virtualisation was a good proposition for the SMB market, most SMBs had greater issues that needed to be addressed first, Annonier said.

“The SMB server room is often a mess, and without clearing that up, moving to a virtual environment is just moving the physical mess to virtual mess,” he said. “SMBs need to work with providers to first clean up their physical servers.”

VMware senior product manager, Andre Kemp, said the vendor was actively providing documentation to assist SMBs in adopting VMware Go and ESXi technology.

He said the perception that its technology was skewed towards the enterprise was unreasonable.

“We’ve been making steps over the last three years with ESXi to address the SMB market,” Kemp said. “Even though we have had this free product and documentation, it’s still been difficult for the non-technically inclined to use the technology – VMware Go fills that gap.”

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