Since the beginning, VMware has struggled to offer a public IaaS market. It partnered with Verizon, Savvis (now CenturyLink), and other tech giants, but none of the partners have amounted to much, considering the other giants in the market. Given the pricing and licensing structure followed by VMware, services offered by Amazon and Microsoft look better in comparison.

For the customers least interested in public cloud infrastructures, their data centers will sport two virtualization vendors. In a survey regarding private cloud hosting, 54% of the participants admitted using VMware products, with Microsoft in second place, with 48%. When inquired about the future use, 61% went with VMware, while 50% of them mentioned Microsoft. Other technologies like Citrix, HP, IBM, Dell, Oracle, and Red Hat followed behind.

With the background of VMware, it is highly likely that they will add high-level cloud management services. Their decision to buy DynamicOps served as a gateway to cloud automation, orchestration, and policy management. From the beginning, DynamicOps have always been about managing heterogeneous environments, and with time included management of public cloud desktop services, like Amazon.

While the founder and CTO, Leslie Muller, of Dynamics have been open about its ability to rapidly integrate with VMware ecosystem. VMware has decided to add two top-level managers along with the company’s product for clouds only, vCloud, and the Dynamics Cloud Suite. The vice president and general manager, cloud infrastructure and management, Ramin Sayar, stated that v Cloud Director is working to offer compatibility with Dynamics by creating automation and integration layer, allowing users to model services with the help of existing VMware Private Cloud Hosting.

To ensure their position as a cross-platform management solution, VMware will need to ensure that Dynamics treats every platform strategically. With the concentration on everything, VMware will leave its customers looking for independent products.

There are plenty of vendors offering just that. Oftentimes they are old-guard vendors like IBM, HP, BMC, and CA. Most of these vendors are rooted as the largest organizations across the globe. Directly competing with them, might not have been a good idea by VMware.