VMware CEO: What we plan for the post-PC era

CEOs can come across as the chief sales officers in interviews, aggressively repeating bullet points that may or may not answer the question at hand. Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, is not that type of guy. From all appearances, he is a deep thinker with a philosophical bent — not to mention he has bona fide technical credentials that stretch back to first half of the 1980s, when he helped Intel create programming tools for its emerging x86 platform.

Before becoming CEO of VMware, where he replaced founder and CEO Diane Green in 2008, Maritz was best known for his 14-year stint at Microsoft, during which time he oversaw the development and marketing of Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Visual Studio, and SQL Server, as well as the Office and Exchange product lines.

Clearly, Maritz has been eyewitness to tremendous change in the industry, which he sees ramping up again as we enter the post-PC era. At VMware, Maritz has helped his company solidify a dominant position in virtualization, but as he made clear in a recent interview conducted by IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant and InfoWorld Editor in Chief Eric Knorr, he has no intention of standing still. The conversation began with Maritz’s assessment of where VMware stands today and how it plans to step beyond virtualization.

John Gallant: People know VMware — your strength in both server and desktop virtualization — but what’s your overall strategy going forward?

Paul Maritz: We’re at an interesting juncture in our history. The company has obviously been very successful and continues to have a very compelling value proposition, which is kind of remediating the sins of the client-server generation. So people have bought our technologies to deal with server sprawl and have saved a lot of capital expense by consolidating servers — and in the process found that they can actually address some operational efficiencies as well. And that’s what has really propelled our company to date.

It’s a great position to be in. But we’re also cognizant of the fact that, unless we think ahead, we will be seen as the closing chapter of the client-server generation instead of the opening chapter of the next generation. We believe there are fundamental shifts happening in the space at the moment. And having been very successful, we’ve — for better or for worse — managed to attract the attention of some very well-funded and entrenched competitors. We have a target painted on our backs by them at this point.

This is not a time for us to be sitting on our laurels and congratulating ourselves. We have to gird our loins for the next lap of the journey. And because we are a very successful, but still a medium-sized company — and we have determined competitors — we have to use change to our advantage. We have to ask: What are the fundamental things that are changing in the world, and how can we get aligned with those changes and use that to our advantage?

Eric Knorr: Tell us about the changes you see taking place.

Maritz: We have a sort of simplistic way of looking at the world, which is to say that we’re not subscribers to the reverticalization of IT. We don’t think that the profound thing that’s going on in the cloud era is a “bigger box” theory of IT — that you’ll get a complete vertical stack from a single vendor. We think that the cloud, whether private or public, is actually the antithesis of that. The cloud is actually about a new horizontal stratification of IT — and we need to align ourselves with that.

Those horizontal stratifications, simply speaking, are about a fundamental transformation of infrastructure into a new, more automated layer. A transformation of how applications are developed on top of that, and then finally, a transformation in how the results of applications are delivered to the end-user. We think profound change is happening in all three of those layers.

Gallant: You’re known for one of those layers.

Maritz: Obviously, our business today and the vast bulk of our revenues come from the infrastructure layer. The good news in our favor is that virtualization as a technique to transform infrastructures is no longer something that we have to evangelize. That’s well accepted, and you know, if you look at the Gartner hype cycle, I think virtualization is kind of out of the slough of despond, and we’re kind of on this slope of enlightenment, just about to reach the plateau of productivity.

So if you believe Gartner’s numbers, if you look at the number of x86-based server applications — and this is sort of the real metric to use — Gartner would say that in the world today 40 percent of the survey applications that could be virtualized are virtualized and are running on virtual infrastructure and predominately on VMware.

That number is growing at about 10 percent a year, which means that a substantial number of our customers are no longer using virtualization on the fringes of their data center but are really starting to use it as a central strategy — not just for running tier 2 and 3 applications, but for tier 1 applications as well.

We refer to that as our “breadth play” and obviously we need to continue that — we need to do everything that we can to enable it to continue. But then we’re going to have to start executing a depth play, because eventually we’ll run out of server applications to virtualize. So we need to allow people not only to virtualize but to do more things in the context of virtualization, really start to tackle issues relating to operational efficiency, resiliency, and security within the virtualized world.

Knorr: How does that strategy align with your current product offerings?

Maritz: So we’re moving to say we have vSphere, which we are continuing to improve to enable it to host as many of the server applications in the world as it possibly can. In other words, let’s get as close to 100 percent as possible; let’s make sure we remove any technical roadblocks to getting to the 100 percent. We have a few customers who are at 100 percent, but most are still way short of that.

But then, in addition, we are building toward a suite of products that will allow us to execute the depth play. We want to allow them to not only increase the quantity of virtualization, but the quality of virtualization. And that’s why we basically think of ourselves as building suite of five products at the infrastructure level.

The next one is vShield, which is really the framework into which virtualized edge functions plug. Because as you build out this pool of virtual capacity, all these servers and storage and networking elements are now linked together through virtualization. We’re going to move things around within that pool to improve efficiency and resiliency, so we’ll not only move things around to load balance, but we’ll move things around too for availability reasons, etc.

The protective functions around an application — the firewall, the load balance, the antivirus engine, the data loss engine — they’re going to have to move with it so that all of those functions today that are typically encoded in a physical device that’s clamped onto a wire somewhere have to be freed from that wire and have to move around in the pool as well. We need a framework for that to enable that to happen.

That’s vShield, and we’re working with all the usual suspects in the industry to get them to turn their functions from physical appliances into, figuratively speaking, virtual appliances that can plug into that framework: virtual load balances, firewalls, routers, antivirus engines, etc.

Gallant: So a framework for virtual appliances.

Maritz: The third element you can think of — and I use this term very loosely — is the user interface to that infrastructure. In other words, how does the producer of that infrastructure expose it to his customers? How does he make it easy for people to come, on the one hand, to provision the applications into that pool, associate policy with those applications into how they should run, and then give them metrics back as to how they’re performing and consuming infrastructure?

That is what we call vCloud Director, which is the layer that adds the user interface, where you can basically describe your workloads, associate policy to them, and get metrics reported back as to how much infrastructure they’re consuming, and so on, which allows an internal IT organization to start behaving more like an internal service provider to internal customers.

The fourth element is our Site Recovery Manager. It’s a suite of software that addresses cross-site disaster recovery, because that’s one of the common uses for this new infrastructure, where you have two active sites backing each other, etc. Site Recovery Manager provides the layer of functionality in terms of allowing you to have cross-site continuity.

Knorr: So vSphere, vShield, vCloud Director, and Site Recovery Manager. What’s the fifth part?

Maritz: The fifth one is actually around the monitoring and management of the big pool that you’ve created. It’s an interesting one because it speaks to this issue of a new horizontal stratification of IT that I was talking about.

Imagine trying to do this on a vertical silo basis. In other words, you try and find the app and then you manage all the way from the app down to the hardware underneath it. Now when you create that pool you’re essentially cutting that stack right through the middle. And the pool provider on the one hand is going to know less about the apps, and the apps, of necessity, know less about what’s going on inside the pool.

If you’re the custodian of that pool, you can’t look at any one individual app and know that your pool is healthy. What’s more, if you turned on all of the logging capability of all the elements down in that pool, it throws so much information at you, that if you’ve got hundreds of servers and hundreds of storage areas there, you’ll never be able to make head or tail of the information coming out of it.

You need to look at a different way of managing and monitoring in this cloud-based horizontal stratification of the world, so we’ve invested in a product called the vCenter Operations suite, anchored on a technology that we acquired last year, which takes a statistical analytic approach to how you monitor and manage infrastructure.

Gallant: How does that help customers?

Maritz: What it says is you’re the end-user, don’t try and figure out which of these logs is really important, which is not. Just give it all to us, just give us absolutely everything you’ve got, we’ll [manage] it, we’ll build a statistical model of your infrastructure and we’ll tell you when we think your giant pool is going outside of the bounds of what we’ve historically seen as normal.

It’s a statistical model, so every now and then it’ll give you false positives. In other words, it’ll say, We think you’ve gone outside the bounds of normal. And you’ll say, Don’t worry, it’s just the end of the month. And it will learn from that.

But what we’ve found it that model tends to be much more sensitive than humans to important changes in the environment. It will start to detect that drift outside of normal before a human will detect it. It will say, Look, here are the five things that have driven the model outside of normal, we think you need to go look at these five things.

Knorr: You might say that these five elements together provide management of the private cloud.

Maritz: Yeah. We’re deliberately very precisely trying to build up a cloud infrastructure suite, and I’ll explain how we see it being applied in a hybrid cloud model. We are not subscribers to the belief that all of the world’s computing is going to be either internal or external.

Knorr: Yes, most customers we talk to say they’re most interested in the private cloud. So how did customers inform your vision of the cloud? What are they telling you that they want?

Maritz: What they said to us in essence is: We would like to make business decisions rather than technology decisions about when we run things internally or externally. And we’d like to be able to change our mind about that, so we’d like to be able to take something out of the external cloud and if we don’t like it we’d like to be able to take it back, and vice versa. And we want to deal with a set of service providers who are willing to talk enterprise language.

You know, a guy who says “we take no liabilities” isn’t someone you can do substantial business with over time. If we’re going to really do this, we have to have people who are willing to engage in enterprise quality. We actually have about 1,000 service providers today who license vSphere from us and are operating some kind of service. We know that because we have an alternative licensing model for service providers, where they can essentially rent our software rather than paying up front for it. We know that very accurately.

Knorr: Many cloud service providers, of course, are going with open source virtualization solutions.

Maritz: We have a lot [of providers] who like the quality of our software, and they like it because it’s familiar to what people have internally. So we have about 1,000 folks who are operating all sorts of businesses on a service provider model.

Within that community, what we’ve elected to do is to try and pick a very small subset of them who are committed to have the same suite in their public clouds. In particular, that user interface is going to be common between the two. The way that you describe and secure and manage your workloads will look the same internally versus externally. What’s more, there are people who are not only willing to talk enterprise, if you like, but they have the means to back it up.

In other words, it doesn’t help for a vendor to say, We’re willing to accept liability. The question is, if you ever had to cash that check, is there something to really go sue or not? So we’ve created this partnership that we call the vCloud Data Center Partnership and try to recruit people in that who will look like credible enterprise service provider partners. Today we have Verizon and Terremark.

Knorr: Right. Those are some reliable partners.

Maritz: At least there’s something to sue there if they go wrong: Verizon, SingTel in Asia, Colt in Europe. Colt is the City of London telephone company that carries all the fiber-optic cable for the financial industry in Europe. Or Softbank in Japan, which is the second largest telecom operator in Japan.

Those are the four anchor tenants, and there’s Bluelock, a small guy that we put in there just to keep them honest and show them that things can actually get done in as short of time scale as [they’re] accustomed to. We’ll expand that by probably another three or four over the next several months.

Interestingly, those companies have started to discuss among themselves forming a consortium so that somebody can say, I want to deal with one entity that can give me coverage in Europe and Asia. Because there’s always going to be regulatory reasons why certain things have to be done in certain jurisdictions independent of technology. How do I work with somebody who says, If the Singapore government requires me to do certain things in Singapore, I can do that, or Japan, or whatever?

Knorr: And how does this elite group of service providers relate to your enterprise customers?

Maritz: Well, that’s hybrid cloud, so we’re saying to them: We think most of our customers are going to go ahead and implement private clouds. When and if you’re ready, there will be this community ecosystem of external service providers. And it’s important that it’s an ecosystem, so you’re not beholden to any one of them, they’ll keep each other honest, who will be ready when you’re ready, to allow you to make business decisions about whether you want to take an application or set of applications and run those in an external cloud. And if you don’t like it, take it back again and move it somewhere else.

Knorr: Is there a direct relationship between this and Vblock?

Maritz: No. A lot of those guys are, but not exclusively, using Vblock. Vblock is really a lower-level construct. Vblock is just an efficient way of providing the hardware basically.

Knorr: You’re saying then that they’ll be using all five elements of your stack, of your infrastructure, so they could appear as a transparent extension to my enterprise infrastructure.

Maritz: That’s exactly what we’re trying to do.

Knorr: Wow. OK.

Maritz: Right now it’s “your mileage may vary,” but that set of six that I mentioned are committed to have 22 data centers started up by the end of this year around the world — a substantial investment.

Gallant: So, Paul, once you go beyond the enterprise infrastructure play into areas like platform as a service and beyond, how do those elements play out?

Maritz: I’ll talk about that. Those five elements I talked about make up one layer. We think of it as three layers.

Layer 1 is essentially our take on infrastructure transformation, which is very firmly in the context of this hybrid cloud — that most businesses are going to have both internal and external infrastructure. Both need to become more efficient in a fundamental way, and that infrastructure has to handle existing applications above all else.

Customers can’t afford to rewrite or abandon their apps, so that infrastructure has to be good at handling existing applications. That’s why virtualization is so important, because the real profound thing about virtualization is it really encapsulates an existing app. When you virtualize, you’re taking an application and the operating system and the middleware, you’re putting in a black box, cutting the tentacles of complexity that tie it to the details of the underlying infrastructure — which allows you to kind of jack the black box up, slide the new functionality in, and slide the black box around.

Gallant: All at the infrastructure level.

Maritz: Virtualization is kind of the on-ramp for existing apps on that journey. Now, the challenge is it’s not the only thing that’ll happen going forward. Customers are now very much on an infrastructure transformation journey; they’ve invested in this over the last two years, they’ve by and large seen good returns.

They know they have more to do, but they now are starting to say the fundamental issue that we face is really our applications. Because if we’re stuck on 20- and 30-year-old application code that was written for an era of paper bills, we’re going to have a problem servicing the Facebook generation. People are going to want to see and consume and manipulate information in a far more flexible and fluid way than they’ve done in the past.

We believe that over the next 5 to 10 years, as big as infrastructure transformation is, that there’s going to emerge a fundamental application transformation that needs to happen. Given our theme of trying to look for the important tides of history, we see that developers over the last 5 to 8 years have kind of revolted against complexity and have taken matters into their own hands. You see coming out of the development space all of these new modern programming frameworks, whether it be Ruby on Rails, Spring, or Django, none of which came from the established vendors.

There’s this developers’ old saying: A pox on your complexity, we’re going to do this in a simpler way. That’s certainly where the new lines of code are being written, so that’s one fundamental change. The other is that developers increasingly want to consume things at a high level. They don’t want to have to worry about cobbling together middleware and mapping into virtual machines, etc. They want all that just handled for them.

Knorr: That is certainly an ongoing trend.

Maritz: And thirdly, the new data fabrics, because coming out of the consumer space, they’ve already had to confront huge amounts of data which can’t be handled through a traditional relational database model. You’ve seen the Hadoops and Cassandras and Reax, and they’re all coming out of the consumer, Internet side of things.

We think that new programming frameworks wanting to consume things at a higher level and new data fabrics are really a disruptive change in that industry — and they will be the foundation on what we think a lot of application renewal will be done. We’ve started to invest in that space in the context of originally acquiring the Spring programming framework, which was technically, arguably the best of breed in this area. In trying to identify the next-generation middleware, we’ve acquired the GemFire distributed data fabric.

But in addition, it was our belief starting about two years ago that it would be an unnatural situation if the world ended up with a couple of highly proprietary über clouds. That would be going back to the mainframe era of the ’60s and ’70s, you know, where you basically could write an app for IBM’s world or Digital’s world or whatever. Moving between them was very, very difficult.

Then Unix came along as a way of kind of bridging that, and it got morphed into Linux and strengthened as it became an open source movement. It is our belief that the developers and the open source world in particular would not eventually tolerate a world of highly proprietary clouds, that eventually out of the open source world they would find a way to basically come up with a new cloaking layer that isolated applications to a greater or lesser degree from the details underneath.

The very loose analogy that you have to be careful about is, if virtualized infrastructure is becoming the new hardware, what’s going to be the new operating system? What will play the role of Linux in terms of isolating you from any details down there?

So a couple years ago we hired two senior developers out of Google who had worked on Google’s internal infrastructure, and one had a Microsoft background. I knew him as Mark Lucovsky, who Steve Ballmer apocryphally threw a chair at when he told him he was quitting to go to Google. The other was Derek Collison, who was a very senior guy out of TIBCO. He basically was the architect of the TIBCO message bus before going to Google.

We said, If you were to do this again, how would you do it? And in particular how would you construct a layer that filled that vacuum? That’s what became Cloud Foundry. And we said if we’re going to come up to that layer and if it’s to fill that vacuum, we can’t keep it proprietary, we have to make it open — open source. That’s why we not only released it but released it under an Apache 2 license, so it truly is an open layer in that sense.

Knorr: Do you see it as competing with OpenStack?

Maritz: It really sits on top of OpenStack, at least as OpenStack is currently conceived.

Knorr: Which is an infrastructure play.

Maritz: Yes. And we see Cloud Foundry, where we had to say you either play here or you don’t play, and if you play you’ve got to be willing to see this layer go everywhere. And we’re expecting it to go everywhere.

Knorr: Including to OpenStack providers.

Maritz: Including on OpenStack, including on Amazon. People are already taking it and doing that.

Knorr: In a lot of the coverage of it people were comparing it to Azure. Are they apples and oranges? It sounds like it based on what you’re talking about.

Maritz: Basically, yes. Azure is a complete proprietary stack. I mean, in some senses, you can say they are both platform as a service, but we actually think there’s a whole bunch of features that Azure doesn’t have. It’s conceptualized in a fundamentally different way. We have cloudfoundry.org, which is the open source project, and we’ve started up cloudfoundry.com, which is where a developer can go and start kicking the tires and actually writing an app in this environment and seeing how it works.

But there is this dual element to it. One is that it’s actually Linux with a cloud, which is what we’re trying to do there. And then we’ve said, OK, let’s stand up an instance, of which we think there will be many instances, where people can go and familiarize themselves with it. We’ve been actually kind of blown away by the response. We have over 25,000 developers signed up in the first month.

Gallant: That’s pretty amazing.

Maritz: To kick the tires … most of them are just signing up to write the Hello World app and see how it works, etc. But still, it surprised us.

Knorr: It’s a virtual circle in the sense that all the work done in the open source part comes back in and benefits…

Maritz: Well, it’s actually an interesting layer, because it has three interfaces on it. On the top it has a set of formalized interfaces that you plug these modern programming frameworks into. So we announced it out of the gate with the plug-in for Spring, the Ruby family, Rails, Sinatra, etc., and now .JS. People have already started to extend that, so we have now got Erlang plugged into it and we’re expecting others to get plugged into it as well.

It has a set of interfaces on the side, kind of figuratively speaking, where you plug in services. That’s where you can plug in different databases, queues, etc. We came out of the gate with the usual suspects, you know, MySQL, Mongo, etc. But we expect people to plug other stuff in at the side. Then it has a binding layer on the bottom that binds it to the particular infrastructure that it’s sitting on top of. Those are formalized, well-defined interfaces.

Gallant: Can I just ask one quick question on this theme? How do you monetize it?

Maritz: Two ways. One is that we think over time we can do hardened versions of this for the private cloud world, where that will be a classic open source-like model where you’re basically selling service and support. We think that we can plug services into the side, so we do have some very valuable services there.

If you look at GemFire, which is a very interesting kind of sleeper in the world of middleware, it’s one of the most strategic apps in the world — the app that the U.S. Department of the Defense uses to track its assets, real-time assets, is built on GemFire. So all of their vehicles that have telemetry on them are reporting their status into GemFire. In theory, you can put up a map of the world and drill down into an aircraft somewhere and find out in real time how much fuel it has onboard as it’s flying. That thing gets 60,000 position updates a second, which you can’t do on a relational database. It just cannot be done. Those kinds of things we can plug into Cloud Foundry and monetize it that way — very important.

Gallant: So how does that work in a service model? As a subscription or…

Maritz: Every service will have its own different kind of model associated with it, depending upon what makes sense in that area. So that’s sort of what we’re trying to do in the pass layer, which is to say — how do we attach ourselves to the new programming frameworks? How do we attach ourselves to how developers want to consume infrastructure? And how do we plug new services into that? And deliberately try to shoot ahead there.

Knorr: Platform as a service has been the slowest to take off of all the cloud categories. What makes you think that Cloud Foundry is going to take off where others so far have not?

Maritz: As I said, we’re deliberately shooting ahead, and we think there are two tales. There’s a tale around existing apps, which explains why the IaaS layer took off first, because it allows you to address existing apps. But we think over time, people are going to want to move expenditure from infrastructure towards apps.

Our layer three is to address how the end-users are going to consume all of this in a post-PC era. We have a business today that goes under the name “desktop virtualization,” our View product line, which is about how do you take a Windows PC and run it in a more manageable and secure fashion by placing it, figuratively speaking, in the data center? There’s a lot of interest in that, primarily for security and management reasons. In industries like financial services people are obviously very concerned about either the data walking out of the door, or people getting inappropriate access to it, and that’s really a high priority for them. There’s a strong momentum behind desktop virtualization, but in really certain vertical parts of the industry.

Knorr: Would you say that the level of desktop virtualization adoption has been a little disappointing?

Maritz: Well, it all depends on sort of what your bar was to begin with. I think it’s fair to say that in the Gartner hype cycle we’ve come down a bit from the inevitable hype. But we actually think there is something profound playing out, which is that in the immediate term, businesses are confronted by the fact that more and more of their users don’t want to have a PC in their hands.

They want to have a tablet or a smartphone and that [businesses] can’t stop that. That’s a battle they can’t win. The days when IT could say, “We specify that everybody in this company will have a black Dell laptop with this build of Windows on it,” are rapidly passing and they’re never coming back.

The challenge is that the Windows desktop plays two roles inside the IT. On the one hand, it was the interface to a particular operating system — Windows. On the other hand, it was the conduit through which IT provisioned capability to a user. That’s where they installed apps, dropped files, turned menus on and off, etc. In a post-PC world where Windows isn’t the only player in the enterprise, that second aspect of the desktop can’t belong to any particular device. And there’s a vacuum. IT doesn’t know how to address that today, so there’s going to have to be change.

Secondly, and this is more speculative, the thing that’s profound about the post-PC era is not just a form-factor change, it’s actually a change in the way people work. The GUI stuff started with work done across the road here at Xerox PARC and then through Microsoft Windows and Mac. It was all about how do we automate a desk circa 1975?

You can see the terminology — the desktop, files, folders, drawers — it was an automated typewriter, which is the word processor, you know. And it was a very document-centric world. It was a belief that most white collar workers spent their time creating documents, and that’s really what you did as a white collar worker.

What has really changed is not only the form factors, but what white collar workers do today is no longer create documents. I mean, not to say that they don’t do it, it’s just not the center of their universe anymore. The center of their universe now is consuming streams of information that are coming to you in much smaller chunks, and filtering that, combining that, commenting on it, recomposing it, and streaming it back out again.

It’s in that sense that I think we’re moving into this post-PC world. It’s not only a form-factor change, it’s also a movement into a post-document-centric world. I think it’s the big change that’s going to play out here. It’s not desktop virtualization, it’s really how does IT adapt to a post-PC era in terms of much greater device heterogeneity and a different way that people want to work in the context of those devices?

That’s a big set of wheels that are going to grind, and we’re trying to think about how to adapt ourselves to that world. We made our first baby step last week when we announced the Horizon App Manager Service, which is, if you sort of squint at it in the right light and you’re willing to make a few heroic leaps of faith, you can see the beginnings of the emergence of that device-independent desktop or workspace emerging.

Gallant: Listening to you talk, I understand perfectly how this middle layer fits in with the work that you’ve done so far. I’m having a little bit more trouble understanding why VMware is well positioned to serve that function for these new devices, new types of applications.

Maritz: Well, we see it as two reasons. One is we have a form of an entry in that space through our desktop virtualization today, and that technology will be useful in this world, because it allows us to project into … all of these areas [as] an evolutionary transition. In our view, technology can inform part of the evolutionary bridge into that world, so we are selling into that world today. We have our foot there. Beyond that, it’s white space.

You could ask the same question you asked about just about every vendor in the industry today. There’s no one who is … overwhelmingly the natural possessor of that space. For a company like us, as I said, we have to go where others aren’t. We like to see white space and say, How do we go there?

Gallant: But when you think of things like, you know, single sign-on or security or management, it does seem like the purview of companies that come out of security or management. How does this play to your strengths in virtualization?

Maritz: That’s why we’ve made some acquisitions in that space. We acquired TriCipher last year; it knows how to bridge from existing identity environments into this new world. This is an area where I think we can make some acquisitions here, we have internal expertise, and we can partner with others in this space.

Gallant: Today, when somebody talks about VMware, they say: VMware, the virtualization company. What do you want them to say a year from now, two years from now: VMware, the….

Maritz: Well, I don’t know about two years from now, but five years from now I’d like to say: VMware, the cloud IT company.

Knorr: What about apps?

Maritz: By and large we’re going to stay away from the app space. We think there are some capabilities that today you can consider apps, but become part of the foundation. So basic email transport capability is to become part of the foundation. That’s why we acquired Zimbra, it gives us that capability. But in general, we will stay away from apps — we want to be an enabler for apps. We would rather be working with and cultivating the app community going forward.

Knorr: What about your acquisition of SlideRocket? That’s an application.

Maritz: Yeah, although again, if you look at SlideRocket — and I realize this is where you have to look at it in the right light and make a few leaps of faith — [you have to take into account] what I was saying earlier about how the future is not going to be around authoring big documents. It’s going to be: How do you take a stream of information and combine it into some form of presentation?

That’s the interesting thing about SlideRocket — it has this notion that a presentation isn’t a static entity. It’s really an aggregation of a bunch of feeds that come together and present it, and every time you do the presentation, what you’re in a sense doing is pulling together all that information and presenting it. We think that could become a foundational capability in whatever this next generation device-independent workspace looks like. But I’ll be the first to admit that we’re in the very, very early days of this, and there’s a lot of water that still has to flow under this bridge.

Knorr: Isn’t it tempting, though, to go the full application route? There’s Google Apps, which isn’t considered quite ready for the enterprise…

Maritz: This is where I think you’ve got to say: Let’s focus on the things we think are going to be truly transformational and we can’t do everything.

Gallant: You were at Microsoft and helped Microsoft capitalize on the emergence of client-server and capture that market opportunity. How do you see Microsoft dealing with the post-PC era and how might that inform your strategy?

Maritz: Well, Microsoft is a very big and capable company with a lot of smart guys, so they’re more than capable of answering those questions themselves. They don’t need me to do it. The thing that I will say, which is something that I worry about, is that when you’ve been very successful, as Microsoft has, it’s very hard to see the world from a different perspective.

In the process of pulling off the automation of that 1975-era desk, they built one of the most valuable businesses the world has ever seen. When you’ve had that kind of success, it’s very hard to see and make a transition to something different. I think this has informed a lot of their struggles in other areas like — why was Apple so successful?

Here I’m speaking completely unencumbered by the facts, as the Car Talk guys like to say.

I’ve been out of Microsoft for 10 years now, so you’re hearing just opinion now as opposed to informed comment of any kind. We look at their travails in phone space; it’s because they — initially, at least — saw that as a PC companion. The only reason that you’d hold a phone like that is because it’s a companion to your PC.

Whereas Apple, I think when they looked to doing the iPhone they said — we’re not going to make this a Mac unit. We’re going to make this a jumped-up iPod. We’re going to look at it as a fundamentally different experience. And suddenly, to their credit, on the iPad they said — this is an expanded iPhone, it’s not, again, a diminished Mac. The fact that they didn’t have quite the overwhelming success that Microsoft had with Windows allowed them to reconceptualize things in a different way.

Clearly, the thing that we have to be careful of, having been very successful at the virtualization layer, is not to think that that’s sufficient, in terms of how you see the world going forward. It’s a very necessary position to be in, but you’ve got to make sure that your success doesn’t blind you to what’s going to happen down the road.

Gallant: That makes sense.

Maritz: These kinds of pivots from one era to the other are very hard to pull off. A lot of folks grumble about Microsoft. Show me the other companies that have done it successfully, because it’s not easy.

Knorr: I know your stint at Microsoft was a while ago, but are there any general management and leadership lessons you learned there that you’re applying now in forging this new strategy?

Maritz: Well, one we spoke about is there’s no tale so seductive as the one you tell yourself. You’ve got to be careful about that. And make sure that that doesn’t color all of your thinking.

And then, great companies are built by people with passion for what they’re doing, and one of the hardest things in the world is to keep that passion alive. How do you keep a large organization really passionate about what it’s doing and believing that what it’s doing is important and that they have an environment where they can do really great things? That’s very hard to do.

Gallant: Paul, to wrap up, what is the key takeaway that you want a professional IT — whether it’s a CIO or someone who’s actually in the trenches deploying the products — what are the key things you want them to know about VMware?

Maritz: The most important thing that we want them to know about VMware is that we are constructing an infrastructure transformation journey that is very real and very actionable. It’s not something where they have to believe they have to invest now to get a return five years from now on that infrastructure, that bottom layer — that there’s a set of concrete things that they can do, each one of which will justify for itself and pay for itself. But it will be actually leading them to where they need to be so that down the road they can free up the funds to go after application transformation and end user transformation.

Gallant: Makes sense. Great, Paul, thank you.

This article, “VMware CEO: What we plan for the post-PC era,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.