Today at EMC World, EMC announced ViPR, a new open storage platform that enables the abstraction of the storage layer into a single pool of virtual storage within a software-defined data center. ViPR will easily integrate with VMware-based environments, and will enable organizations to centrally access and manage EMC and heterogeneous physical storage infrastructure.

By extending the benefits of the software-defined datacenter to storage, customers will be able to use their existing VMware infrastructure with ViPR to drive greater value, automation and simplicity out of their existing storage solutions.

At VMware, our mission is to extend the benefits of virtualization to all areas of the data center — beyond compute to security, networking, management and storage. With the help of our strategic partners, such as EMC, we can help customers realize greater efficiency, flexibility and agility in their IT infrastructure through a software-defined data center architecture.

Please see the EMC news release for further details on this announcement, and also a blog post on the news from Amitabh Srivastava, President, EMC Advanced Software Division.

The world is changing and if you’re deep in the IT trenches, it’s hard to see what’s coming. If you do find time to peer out on the horizon and think about the future, it can still be hard to know how these sweeping changes might affect you.

In talking with customers, as I get to do regularly, I hear about challenges like this all the time. But I also get to hear amazing and creative ways that organizations are meeting these challenges. That’s why I’ve decided to more regularly contribute to this blog, sharing with you how people are overcoming the uncertainty they face.

Big initiatives like mobility, cloud computing, and collaboration are dramatically changing the way organizations work and therefore the way IT works. My posts here are meant to start a dialogue on what those changes might mean to you and ways that you can best respond to them. We’re facing an inflection point that represents the potential for huge changes in IT, and the time is coming to take control – or face being controlled.

Whether you realize it or not, your monopoly for providing technology to the enterprise is over. You need to adapt. Sometimes you will provide services; sometimes you will have to outsource those services to cloud service providers. I think the path is fairly well defined: IT will become a broker for services that the business needs, with a remit to find the best source of those services, internally or externally.

Whichever path IT takes, you must become more strategically aligned with your business. You must understand both the business’ needs and your real ability to supply them. And if you can’t supply certain capabilities, you will need to have the insight and expertise to identifying best-in-class services from among a multitude of service providers based on what is most important to the business: cost, value, or responsiveness.

Make no mistake – IT still has much to contribute. I’m not suggesting it will go away. But you must develop (in fact, you already should have developed) a bifurcated view that gives you insight to both what the business really needs, and how IT can best serve the business.

I realize that’s a tall order for you as an IT professional, and it’s a tall order for me to chronicle that change. But at VMware, we see our customers – CIOs, infrastructure architects, data center administrators, network engineers, IT ops teams, etc. – pushing the envelope all the time. Sometimes we educate you; sometimes you educate us. Either way, we’re all on a journey across a new and ever-changing landscape.

Now, as anyone who saw Planes, Trains, and Automobiles knows traveling with a partner (I’ll let you determine if you’re more like Steve Martin or John Candy) can be problematic, so let’s set out a couple of ground rules.

First, even though this blog is from VMware, I’m not going to talk just about VMware, or our products, except to occasionally illustrate a very specific scenario. I want to focus more on helping you transform your IT department and understand the opportunity we all have available to us today.

Second, this is not a megaphone for me to shout through; it’s a telephone. In other words, the communication should go both ways. I want to hear your challenges, your concerns, your questions and suggestions. I want this to become a forum for anyone who is trying to navigate this new world. Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Like many of you, I’ve been in IT a long time… and for most of that history, IT has just been a builder. But it is now clear that we must evolve beyond that. IT will still be a builder, but IT will also be a broker. And a major challenge will be to understand when to be one or the other, based on what is best for the business. The ship has sailed… IT has to transform itself, to become far more agile, so the business can be more agile. You can either lead that change, or you’ll be at its mercy.

In my next post, we’ll get started tackling these challenges, starting with the shift from thinking about infrastructure to working on innovation.

Ramin Sayar is vice-president and general manager of VMware. He blogs regularly about the ongoing challenges customers face in a changing IT world.

Guest post by IDC Group Vice President Michael Fauscette

The discussion of how businesses can use the concepts, tools and processes that have emerged from the social web is getting louder, and it’s an important issue that many businesses are trying to sort out. Social business and particularly enterprise social networks (ESN), offer some important benefits and in fact, companies that are using ESN’s are reporting many diverse business benefits and advantages. For businesses that are using social technologies, many began as experiments with some grass roots efforts by a small part of the business, and were targeted at very specific needs / issues. More often than not, these early efforts are “under the radar”, and are not sanctioned by IT.  They’re started by employees trying to solve a problem in the best way they can, when the tools provided by the business are not sufficient for some reason. Employees feel empowered to take action (that’s a good thing), and often have unmet expectations around enterprise tools growing out of the “consumerization of IT” trend. The “bad” side of this though, is the potential risk for the business around security, compliance and intellectual property (IP) protection.

I’ve talked with many CIO’s and IT managers who feel like they are under attack by employees that are unhappy with enterprise systems and tools and who expect the world of work to mimic the online experiences of their personal interactions. They want tablet computing devices and smartphones that are currently not supported by IT, so they just “bring their own” and put the devices on the network themselves. Face it, this is a tech savvy workforce, and that savvy is growing every day. When they use software they expect the experience to be simple, straightforward and efficient. A lot of enterprise software is getting “long in the tooth” and the user experience (UX) is 20+ years old. The software still works and does a good enough job, but employees don’t want to use it. So what’s the IT organization to do?

IT has to be involved in assisting the business to get new social and collaborative tools in place, that much is absolutely clear. For businesses to be successful with social tools and the accompanying cultural change, IT needs to become a business partner to ensure that the tools that are put in place are secure, scalable, enterprise ready software and that the implementation of the tools, including change management, is successfully executed. The opportunity to be involved at both the strategic level and the tactical execution level of building a social business is very important for corporate IT. With IT involved the business can be sure that all of the important concerns around the selection and deployment of an ESN are considered. This includes:

• Security and compliance
• Integration
• Mobile capabilities
• Decision support / analytics
• User experience
• User adoption

The potential benefits of a fully deployed ESN are high and critical for businesses, but without IT involvement the risk is great. At the same time, IT can’t be seen as a roadblock to progress, particularly around ESN’s and collaboration. Many of the collaboration tools that were deployed by IT in the past were very file centric and all about controlling information. In the new paradigm the tools must be people-centric and facilitate knowledge sharing. If your collaboration tools are not built around the new approach they are not sufficient to meet todays business challenges and your employees are likely circumventing the tools and IT oversight to get their jobs done.

Blocking access to public social tools and networks also isn’t a viable option, even tough I see IT organizations try and enforce bans. In a world where almost every employee has a smartphone in his/her pocket, there’s really no way to shut off access. Instead IT should help the business develop reasonable policies, train employees and help sort out the real needs of the business around social.

IT can and should be an important partner to the business users in working out an enterprise social strategy. As a partner it’s much easier to solve the other risk issues while meeting the needs of the business.

*****

Michael Fauscette leads IDC’s Software Business Solutions Group, which encompasses research and consulting in enterprise software applications including ERP, SCM, CRM, PLM, collaboration and social applications, software partner and alliance ecosystems, open source software, software vendor business models, SaaS and cloud computing, and software pricing and licensing. He also provides thought leadership in the area of social applications and the transition to the social business.

Prior to joining IDC Mr. Fauscette held senior consulting and services roles with seven software vendors including Autodesk, Inc., PeopleSoft, Inc. and MRO, Inc. Mr. Fauscette graduated with special honors from Jacksonville State University with a BA in Sociology and History and with honors from Widener University with a MS in Business.

Follow Mike Fauscette on Twitter.

You may have heard the rumors and speculation that VMware is changing its pricing model with the introduction of a new version of VMware vSphere.  There’s only one way to find out the complete story – join us at VMworld San Francisco on August 27th to hear all the newsworthy announcements.

If you can’t join us in person next week, you can stay on top of the latest announcements about VMware’s cloud strategy and solutions by tuning into VMware NOW, the new online destination for breaking news, product announcements, videos and demos at: http://vmware.com/go/now