App Store for the Enterprise?

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

This is interesting: IT Structures announced today that they were selected by VMware to work together to provide the App on Demand feature for virtual appliances, part of the Virtual Appliance Marketplace. The full press release is here.

I’ve never heard the Virtual Appliance Marketplace described this way, but the e-mail I received from IT Structures (which I’m sure quite a few people received as well) described it as “the iPhone App Store for the enterprise”. I suppose that is a valid comparison, but it certainly doesn’t do anything for the growing image that the Virtual Appliance Marketplace is not the place to go for enterprise-class virtual machines. Most people seem to see the Virtual Appliance Marketplace as the place to go for home-grown, hobbyist solutions, but not for enterprise-ready virtual appliances that even the largest companies could trust. In my mind, comparing the Virtual Appliance Marketplace to the iPhone App Store doesn’t do anything for its enterprise image.

Perhaps the rise of the Virtual Appliance Marketplace does signal “an important shift in how enterprise applications will be evaluated and sold,” but is this the right shift?

Tags: ,

  1. Greg Ferro’s avatar

    Greg Ferro on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 9:59 am

    Marketing people are always so easily attracted to bright shiny things. Is not the iPhone app store the meme.

    Someone has spent too much time on Social Media and forgotten what language the customer speaks.

  2. Oleg Hen’s avatar

    Oleg Hen on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 11:51 am

    Looking at IT Structures web site they seem to have quite a few enterprise customers http://www.itstructures.com/customers.aspx.

  3. slowe’s avatar

    slowe on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 3:43 pm

    Greg, was that comment about spending too much time on social media directed at me? :-)

  4. Adam Hawley’s avatar

    Adam Hawley on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 9:07 pm

    Delivering on virtual appliances in a way that is really useful is a challenge for the industry: it needs to contain all the right components and it needs to be configured right way, i.e. it needs to have all the components and the configuration to be realistic for use in a production environment. And, let’s not forget, it needs to be licensed correctly for distribution and use as an appliance, which can be a challenge in a mixed open source / proprietary world. Not many companies can put it all together the right way. Hosting the virtual appliance perhaps solves the smaller problem of getting access, but not these larger issues of basically what’s in it and how it is configured, at least for the enterprise. I don’t think most enterprise users wouldn’t feel comfortable doing a POC on-line without testing it in-house in any case.
    Adam Hawley, Director
    Oracle VM Product Management
    http://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/