VMware management portfolio for the cloud era unveiled: vCenter, vFabric, and IT Business Management suites

VMware today announced the expansion of its portfolio of management solutions, announcing significant enhancements to VMware vCenter Operations™ and the introduction of new VMware vFabric Application Management™ and VMware IT Business Management suites, to simplify applications and IT business management in virtual and cloud environments. By integrating management and automation tools together with performance, capacity and configuration analytics, VMware is simplifying the approach to cloud management.

“Enterprises need a simplified approach to managing IT and extracting more value in their journey to the cloud,” said Andrew Dutton, Senior Vice-President & General Manager, Asia Pacific Japan of VMware. “According to Forrester’s Cloud Computing in Asia Pacific – The Annual Cloud Maturity Index, 72 per cent of companies in the Asia Pacific Japan region valued automated management as a critical feature of cloud computing adoption while common management between private and public cloud environments were also seen as important. Our management solutions portfolio, including the vCenter Operations Management Suite, help our customers address this in an proactive, agile and efficient manner.”

VMware Unveils Management Portfolio for the Cloud Era

New Product Suites Continue to Reduce IT Complexity, Automate Cloud Management to Help Customers Deliver IT as a Service

Manila, Philippines – Oct 18, 2011 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today unveiled three product suites designed to simplify and automate IT management. With significant enhancements to VMware vCenter Operations™ and the introduction of new VMware vFabric Application Management™ and VMware IT Business Management suites, VMware will help customers amplify the value of their virtual environments and achieve the agility and economics of cloud computing.

“As IT organizations are implementing private and hybrid clouds, traditional management approaches associated with physical distributed systems and siloed management disciplines just aren’t capable of keeping up with the pace and scale of modern IT operations,” said Boaz Chalamish, senior vice president and general manager, enterprise management at VMware. “VMware’s management solutions will deliver a new approach that takes advantage of cloud infrastructure, is focused on eliminating IT complexity rather than orchestrating it, and will support IT’s ability to act as a broker of services to the businesses it serves.”

VMware vSphere® has helped thousands of companies transform their datacenters, simplifying many core systems management functions by building them into the virtualization platform. VMware’s management philosophy is to continue to eliminate complexity across all areas of IT management – infrastructure, applications and the business of IT – by embedding and integrating management into its platforms, converging management disciplines to streamline processes and applying analytics to help customers achieve the degree of intelligence and automation required to deliver IT as a service.

“Capital markets customers have some of the most unique and stringent requirements for security, technology performance and platform reliability.  They demand more from cloud solutions than typically offered by those outside our industry in terms of information security, managing large quantities of data, running high-performance applications and reliably connecting to their counter-parties,” said Stanley Young, CEO, NYSE Technologies. “By tapping the power of VMware’s innovations in virtual infrastructure management, we were able to bring the financial industry’s first cloud computing solution specifically built for the global capital markets community to life, and at a cost well within the reach of all market participants.”

New Suites Simplify and Automate IT Management

VMware’s new management solutions will help customers transform how they manage infrastructure, applications and business services in virtual and cloud environments:

Infrastructure: The VMware vCenter Operations Management™ Suite

The highly dynamic nature of cloud infrastructure has outpaced traditional operations management disciplines. Introduced in March 2011, VMware vCenter Operations simplifies and automates operations by integrating performance, capacity and configuration management and applying analytics to deliver the actionable intelligence customers need to proactively ensure service levels in cloud environments.

With this update, VMware will continue to deliver on its strategy of converging management disciplines with deeper integration of VMware vCenter Capacity IQ™ and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager™. New dashboards and smart alerts will correlate performance and capacity information to identify emerging problems, help customers “right size” their infrastructure and identify and remediate performance issues caused by configuration changes. In addition, the vCenter Operations Management Suite will include new application awareness capabilities that automatically discover and map the relationships and dependencies between applications and the infrastructure components that support them.  This means customers will be able to optimize infrastructure operations such as security management and disaster recovery based on application needs.

Learn more about the vCenter Operations Management Suite

Applications: The vFabric Application Management™ Suite

The move to cloud computing and the increasing velocity of application demand are causing organizations to rethink how they develop and manage applications, driving the emergence of converged application operations models such as “DevOps.”  To help customers increase agility and improve application performance, VMware is introducing a new application management suite that will empower application owners to deploy and manage a new generation of applications running on virtual and cloud infrastructures.

The vFabric Application Management Suite will include two new solutions that integrate application disciplines to unite and streamline developer and operations efforts.  Together, these suites support an “active application management” approach that will help IT keep up with business demand for application changes and more effectively maintain application performance and availability in dynamic environments. vFabric AppDirector will standardize and automate the release/deployment of applications to any cloud through easy-to-create blueprints with standardized templates, component libraries, and deployment workflows. vFabric Application Performance Manager will help customers proactively manage application performance in virtual and cloud environments. The vFabric Application Management Suite is optimized for vFabric, but extensible to other frameworks.

Learn more about the vFabric Application Management Suite

The Business of IT: The VMware IT Business Management Suite

With the rise of public cloud services, the role of enterprise IT organizations is evolving into a broker of services to the business.  This shift requires better visibility into costs, service levels and vendor operations. VMware is introducing the IT Business Management Suite, which is based on technologies from VMware’s June 2011 acquisition of Digital Fuel, to provide the rigor and discipline CIOs need to optimize the business value of IT investments and communicate IT’s value in language the business understands.

The suite will include three modules: IT Finance Manager, IT Service Level Manager and IT Vendor Manager. Together, they will aggregate data from a wide range of financial sources and apply analytics and modeling to offer a single pane of glass into IT capital, operating and service expenses with meaningful metrics and reports.  The IT Business Management suite will allow CIOs to make informed sourcing decisions based on cost, risk, performance and compliance in order to operate as a broker of IT services in full alignment with business needs.

Learn more about the IT Business Management Suite

“Cloud computing requires a new way of thinking about the delivery of IT services,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner. “Automation is key not only to enable scale, but to keep pace with the rate of change in dynamic environments. And, as the infrastructure itself becomes programmable, management tools and processes must be updated to support an integrated, agile approach that spans across the IT divide.”

Read industry comments on VMware’s management solutions

Pricing and Availability

The updated vCenter Operations Management Suite will be offered in four editions to meet the IT operations needs of small and midsized businesses and enterprises, and is expected to be available in early 2012 with prices starting at $50 per VM.  The updates will also be available as a free upgrade for current vCenter Operations customers. For more information, visit http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-operations/buy.html

To help customers more rapidly experience the tangible benefits of VMware’s operations management solutions, VMware is introducing a new vCenter Operations Management Accelerator Service. The latest offering in VMware’s portfolio of Operations Management Services, the new service lays the foundation for customers to begin more efficiently and effectively managing their virtual and cloud environments.

vFabric Application Performance Manager is expected to be available in Q4 2011 with prices starting at $360 per VM. vFabric AppDirector is expected to be available in early 2012. For more information, visit http://www.vmware.com/go/apm-suite

The IT Business Management Suite is expected to be available in Q4, 2011 and will be licensed per user.  For more information, visit http://www.vmware.com/go/itbm-suite

Additional Resources

• Learn more about VMware’s IT management solutions
• Visit the online press kit for product information, graphics and videos
• Read VMware CTO Steve Herrod’s blog:  “It’s Time to Rethink IT Management”

About VMware

VMware is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable businesses to thrive in the Cloud Era.  Customers rely on VMware to help them transform the way they build, deliver and consume Information Technology resources in a manner that is evolutionary and based on their specific needs. With 2010 revenues of $2.9 billion, VMware has more than 300,000 customers and 25,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware, VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Operations, VMware vCenter Capacity IQ, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager and VMware vFabric Applications Management are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding the expected benefits for users and availability of VMware’s three new product suites to automate IT management. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in consumer or information technology spending; (iii) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures, industry consolidation, entry of new competitors into the virtualization market, and new product and marketing initiatives by our competitors; (iv) our customers’ ability to develop, and to transition to, new products and computing strategies such as cloud computing and desktop virtualization; (v) the uncertainty of customer acceptance of emerging technology; (vi) rapid technological and market changes in virtualization software and platforms for cloud and desktop computing; (vii) changes to product development timelines; (viii) VMware’s ability to protect its proprietary technology; and (ix) VMware’s ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees.. These forward looking statements are based on current expectations and are subject to uncertainties and changes in condition, significance, value and effect as well as other risks detailed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K that we may file from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. VMware assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.