The Console

Posted by Ben Matheson
Director of Small and Medium Business

This week marks two super important milestones. First, the start of NFL regular season football (Go Patriots!!). Second, a new promotion we are launching for SMB customers. I thought the promotion (certainly not the football season) would be breaking news but turns out some bloggers are quicker on the draw than I am and have been posting about it. So today I want to open our “playbook” about what we are doing and also talk about the next evolution in VMware’s product offerings targeted at SMB’s.

This week we are “kicking off” a new promotion called VI3 Foundation targeted at customers that want the advanced functionality of VI3 but for smaller deployments. For $3,000 a customer gets VirtualCenter Server 2.0 plus three 2-processor licenses for VMware Infrastructure 3 Starter Edition. So for $3,000 an SMB gets our hypervisor based virtualization platform (ESX Server) and our fully functional management product VirtualCenter. For more information you can go to our website.

I said this was an evolution and it is. VMware was the first company to introduce a free virtualization product with VMware Server in Summer of 2006. We were the first commercial vendor to have a free P2V/ V2V product called VMware Converter Starter Edition that reached general availability back in January, 2007. Finally a key piece of our strategy is virtual appliances and any customers can go out to Virtual Appliance Marketplace and easily download trial virtual appliances including 3^rd party software. VMware was the first to enable these technologies for free. We had some followers (as all market leaders do) but we were the first company that believed that enabling customers to have free virtualization products was important. Can’t beat the value of free.

VMware also launched a management product in February, 2007 called VirtualCenter for VMware Server. This management product is designed to manage VMware Server and for $1,500 you can buy and manage three physical servers with unlimited virtual machines on those physical boxes. You can manage incremental physical boxes for $400 per physical machine. With VirtualCenter for VMware Server you can centrally manage and monitor your virtual machines and physical servers and rapidly provision VM’s from a library of images. Again it’s a solution which provides great value to customers.

We also have had a version of our high end virtualization product named VMware Infrastructure 3 Starter for over a year. The product costs $1,000 and gives customers the true power, reliability and security of ESX Server, our hypervisor based virtualization product. This is the base for our new VI3 Foundation promotion.

As many customers, partners and press have noted, customers love the high end functionality that VMware Infrastructure 3 provides including technologies like VMotion, VMware High Availability, DRS and VMware Consolidated Backup. The belief that SMB customers need only basic functionality is not true. Sure some do, but many want all the goodness that VI3 Enterprise Edition has to offer. And generally customers tell us they start seeing a return on their VI3 investment almost immediately. Customers are seeing great value from reducing costs, improving manageability and improving the availability of their systems. Anytime a customer sees a very fast return and can save both capital and operating expense almost immediately there is a great value.

More info…

We will be announcing more news for SMB customers over the rest of 2007 so stay tuned and you will see more coming. If you are a medium or smaller business and are looking for more info you can go to www.vmware.com/solutions/smb and get more detail.

Thanks and I’ll be blogging soon,

Ben