So, why is vFabric on the CIO Agenda? In short, technology trends and basic economics.

In this article, we outline, provide key highlights, share the slides, and link to an on-demand, CIO.com webinar titled, “Your business is now a software business. Now what?” In the recording, Tom Schmidt, Managing Editor at CIO.com, targets several questions to Al Sargent, Group Manager, VMware Cloud and Application Services, about how vFabric fits into the CIO agenda.

The webinar covers the following four topics, and a short summary is below:

1. Why every business is a software business
2. The clear trends with VMware vFabric customers and prospects
3. Cloud Scale and Economics
4. Pricing Comparisons of vFabric to Competitors

Is every company really in the business of software?

Yes, it’s true – every company is a software company. In every industry, technology is being used more and more, and this puts CIOs and IT leaders in a more strategic position to help the company grow the topline and reduce costs. Marc Andreessen described this  a well-known article titled, “Software is Eating the World.”  For example:

• Internal processes across every department are managed more and more by software systems like collaboration, email, financials, and analytics. Is there any employee left who can get any work done if their computer is down? Probably not. Will any departments stop functioning if a key software app is down? Of course. Are different business units asking for more technology solutions? Yes.
• Companies are pushing harder to win with customer-facing technology like search, mobile apps, shopping websites, devices, sensors, downloadable content, social media, and more.  Does an outage of any of your company’s applications cause revenue to come to a halt? Probably. Even small businesses need to swipe credit cards and most major brands are embracing technology (e.g. in their top company goals and mission statements).

One can easily argue that, every day, software is playing a greater role business. As CIOs and IT leaders, we are helping businesses use technology more and more effectively. Ultimately, we are on the hook to help get better returns from our use of technology and technology’s related investments and expenses.

Key Trends with VMware Customers and Prospects

While the online presentation goes into greater detail for each, we see four key trends from our customers, partners, and prospects. Clearly, companies are responding to these trends for economic reasons:

1. Virtualization and cloud delivery models reduce IT CAPEX/OPEX and improve business unit support.
2. Social and mobile applications are pervasive and fundamentally drive new application requirements and investments to improve customer engagement.
3. Data creation and consumption has increased in volume, speed, and is more dynamic–all to help drive better business results.
4. Modern developer frameworks like Spring significantly enhance productivity, reduce risk, and increase portability.

Let’s look at one important yet simple example of how customers respond to these trends–how Java applications benefit from vFabric.  There are several other examples cited in the recorded presentation.

Cloud Scale and Economics

First of all, vFabric can save you about 50% to 85% in license costs compared to Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere. That is a huge savings. Then, virtualization drives a greater impact. VMware customers see an average server consolidation ratio of 10 VMs to one physical server. While every situation is different, you can reduce hardware costs significantly by virtualizing and reducing unused capacity.

Let’s look specifically now at vFabric tc Server’s footprint. Whether you are building or buying applications, Java apps probably exist somewhere in your data center–perhaps dozens of application servers exist or even thousands. While vFabric is an entire suite with many benefits, vFabric tc Server (the vFabric Java application server based on Tomcat) impacts virtualization and cloud delivery models quite significantly because it is lightweight. From an app server operating perspective:

• tc Server takes somewhere between 4x and 40x less disk space than competitors.
• tc Server commits between 3x and 15x less memory at start-up than competitors.

Immediately, you can do the back-of-the-napkin math for having more JVMs and VMs fit on a physical host because of smaller resource needs. The vFabric Suite also has built in capabilities to improve Spring developer productivity, reduce project risk, speed deployment in any environment, improve application SLAs, and increase JVM memory utilization.

tc Server is built to be the most cost effective place to run Java on virtualized infrastructure, and it is.

Pricing Comparisons of vFabric to Competitors

Besides the lower cost, pricing and licensing in the cloud needs to work differently to be effective for companies. In the recorded presentation, we spend quite a bit of time explaining how our pricing is different and better for customers for three reasons:

• Our licensing is hardware independent. Legacy licenses are bound to hardware factors like chipset. In a modern data center where you can do a live migration of a virtual machine and want an infrastructure to scale and share resources elastically, hardware-bound licenses cause barriers, extra steps, and headaches.
• Our licensing is based on actual use not peak use. Instead of being charged for peak workloads, you pay based on average use only.
• Our licensing is flexible. We have a single-SKU model that includes the entire suite.  If you start with 6 licenses (3 nodes on the web-tier, 2 on the app-tier, and 1 on the data-tier), and need to move nodes and licenses around, you can do so without penalty.