RSS and Componentization

My blog entry on RSS spurred seemed to spur some interest - it even led to an article in SearchDataCenter. I should put a plug for Cote from Red Monk since he and I have discussed RSS a bit and he's on top of standardization and process. It's interesting to me how standards arise in industries: 1) by way of industry groups vying thru mutual interest/benefit for standards, and 2) by de facto demand by the user community. I think RSS is a combination of the two. But I don't think anyone anticipated all the potential end uses of RSS when it was originally defined. I enjoy seeing the chaos of innovation around technologies beyond intended purposes. RSS is one of those where we'll see uses that extend into areas such as Systems Management, Customer Support, and beyond. We starting to see hints of such innovation around virtual environments - specifically VMware.

As VMware has become more and more prevalent as a platform, the platform itself is becoming less interesting - it's there and it works - while the applications (usage of the platform) are becoming more interesting. VMware is at an interesting inflection point where they have been the focus for enablement of their platform and have provided interesting applications to migrate, consolidate, and manage the environment - and the focus (and rightly so) has been on the ecosystem around enabling the platform. And while the platform is currently dominant, it's key to have the platform specific applications that fully leverage it's capabilities. Easy examples are VMware appliances that provide specific capabilities - I mentioned the Media server in a prior blog - other examples, include demo platforms, system management appliances, and even application servers where you want instant portability. I'm curious how many third parties are making significant revenue providing such specific applications? One I know of is Surgient which provides "virtual lab management" software on "standard" virtual infrastructure (ie, VMware). From my experience, most of the current uses of VMware are around proprietary customer applications and migrating these applications from physical to the virtual environment. And that's not a bad use, just doesn't create a long term and dynamic ecosystem. For BMC, we already provide specific management functionality for VMware, and we're seeing use/revenue for these products (monitoring, performance management, and capacity planning), but almost exclusively in the context of the migrated legacy apps. I'm not saying the VMware specific applications are not there, I just have not heard of a lot of revenue being generated in that domain yet. Am I wrong?

Regardless, as the platform matures, there will be extensive opportunities - capacity planning will become more critical for production VMware workloads, power and coolling (which Dave Wagner has written extensively about) will become more critical, and we'll see a chaos of innovation we haven't anticipated.