Analyzing VMware’s past to chart the future of multicloud

In this the 10th year of theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld, I’m going to take a look at the ebb and flow of VMware Inc.’s role in the waves of change in the technology industry and what’s coming next. Server virtualization is pervasive today, but in the early days, it took a lot of time to educate and sort out the details of what would and wouldn’t work. The timing of server virtualization was good: Server sprawl was prevalent in data centers, and the dot-com burst had companies looking at cost saving initiatives.Server utilization was typically in the single digits, so the idea of consolidating many physical machines into a fewer with the utilization of virtual machines was attractive. One of Wikibon’s earliest projects back in the 2000s before I joined was helping customers claim rebates from energy companies for deploying VMs. In these early days, the requirements of the hardware were very important: An incompatible BIOS could take a long time to sort out.