I am back (on the blogsphere)!

Yes I am back. After a few months of "electronic silence" (on this blog at least) here I am again. For those (few) of you that may have been wondering "where (on earth) is he?"..... well lots of things happened and I have been pretty busy. One for all I joined VMware after having spent more than 15 years at IBM and I felt like I have been literally hit by a train running over me at 200Km/h. I have hardly had the time to breath in these last few months (let alone posting on my blog). To give you a sense of what I have been doing... I can say I have seen more check-in totems than traffic lights in the last few months and my almost two-year-old (beautiful) daughter's favorite is "dad is on a plane, dad is one a plane". That's perhaps why, when she sees me, she's like "mummy, who's he?".

So what do I do for VMware? I work in a global team of very talented people (me being an exception) as a vCloud Architect for Europe. I work with Service Providers, Hosters, and Outsourcers to help them build their Public Cloud service offerings. The funny thing is that I thought that having an EMEA scope meant doing 2 or 3 conference calls (in English) per week and that was about it. It turned out that, at VMware, having an EMEA scope really means the plane is your second first home. Ah, of course this is on top of 2 or 3 (overlapping) conference calls per day. Does it sound interesting? It is indeed, I wouldn't change it for anything (and yes I was of course exaggerating when I talked about my daughter, otherwise I wouldn't be doing all this).

By now you may start to see why I haven't been blogging too much lately. However it's not like I disappeared completely from the blogsphere as I tweet from time to time and I also started blogging on the VMware vCloud corporate blog as part of my new role. This is something I will continue to do and this is an example of how I am contributing there if you are interested.

So how is this blog (or site as a whole) going to be evolving over time? Good question. First and foremost this will continue to be my voice and not the VMware voice as I stated clearly in the About page. I will continue to express my opinions and if they happen to be pro-VMware I'd like you to think that I have joined VMware because I am saying those pro-VMware things (in which I believe) rather than thinking that I am saying those things because I joined VMware (as an obligation to my employer). Things that I will discuss here will not necessarily reflect the opinions and the strategies of my employers even though some of the stuff I say may very well align. My contribution to the VMware vCloud corporate blog will be, on the other hand, more institutional and I will be having my "VMware hat" when talking there. This doesn't mean I will just be repeating a marketing story, but it rather means that I will be discussing things with a VMware perspective in mind.

Last but not least, one of the first consequences of this switch is that I am going to discontinue one of the most famous hit page of my site which is the Virtualization Software Comparison table (if I am counting well I am around 50.000 hit since it went live). I am doing this for a couple of reasons:

1. Being now a VMware employee, no matter how "independent" I will try to be, you will always have the feeling (or at least the doubt) that this is VMware biased. The only value of that table was the trust that you could put in it and that it was done and maintained by an independent entity.
2. More importantly this market is maturing and shifting very quickly. So it is the value of these solutions. We have got to the point where a yes/no table like this is not capturing the true essence of what's going on in the industry at the moment which goes well beyond a set of features like those. I usually like to make a parallel with the car industry where if I say that my car has 6 gears, a steering wheel, 4 wheels, 5 seats and a powerful engine... you can't really say whether I am talking about a Skoda or a BMW can you? Similarly if I am saying that I have a phone that can take and make calls, can play music and you can download applications on it... you can't really say whether I am talking about a 300€ Nokia or a 600€ iPhone right?

This is pretty much it for now. The TV in front of me in the hotel room says it's 1:06AM and I have a wake up call scheduled later at 6:45AM. I am sure you don't mind if I take a short nap now. All in all I just wanted to say I am still alive and if you are still on this station, stay tuned.

Thanks for reading my blog. Massimo.