Microsoft Takes a Shot at VMware. At VMworld. In the USA Today.

Dear VMware customers,

VMware is asking many of you to sign 3-year license agreements for your virtualization projects.  But with the arrival of cloud computing, signing up for a 3-year virtualization commitment may lock you into a vendor that cannot provide you with the breadth of technology, flexibility, or scale that you’ll need to build a complete cloud computing environment.

Microsoft believes cloud computing, which lets you store information and programs in datacenters and access them from almost anywhere with the same ease as accessing a website, represents the biggest opportunity in decades for organizations to be more agile and cost-effective.  Information Technology is evolving into a service accessible from almost anywhere, anytime, and any device.  Virtualization clearly played a role in enabling this move toward IT services by simplifying the deployment and management of desktops and datacenters, which is why we made virtualization part of Windows Server.  However, virtualization represents only a stepping stone toward cloud computing.

Imagine never having to set up a server, update an operating system or build a database system.  That is the promise of cloud computing: the ability to access core services quickly and roll out legacy software and new applications at Internet scale without having to deal with today’s deployment logistics, which exist even with a virtualized datacenter.  In other words, if you liked the efficiencies and cost savings of virtualization, you’ll love the cloud.

At Microsoft, we already offer many of the brands you know, use and trust today as cloud computing services, including Microsoft Office, Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL.  In addition, our cloud computing platform, called Windows Azure, lets organizations migrate legacy applications and roll out new programs written in .NET, Java, Ruby=on-Rails®, PHP and Eclipse across multiple datacenters so they are accessible at scale from almost everywhere.

If you’re evaluating a new licensing agreement with VMware, talk to us first.  You have nothing to lose and plenty to gain.  Not only is Microsoft’s server virtualization solution approximately one-third the cost of a comparable solution from VMware, but also a recent Microsoft study of 150 large companies showed those running Microsoft virtualization spent 24% less on IT labor than an ongoing basis (Learn more at http://www.microsoft.com/vmwarecompare).  Most importantly, as you build out the next generation of your IT environment, we can provide you with scalable worldwide public cloud computing services that VMware does not offer.

Learn how Microsoft can help your business with desktop, datacenter and cloud computing.  Call us or learn more at http://www.microsoft.com/cloud.

We appreciate your business.

Sincerely,

Brad Anderson
Corporate Vice President, Server & Tools Business
Microsoft Corporation