“It isn’t easy to create apps for the real world,” is the opening line of this morning’s VM World conference in San Francisco.
That line encapsulates the challenge facing almost every company, not just tech companies like VMWare, in the face of shifting marketplaces and technologies.
One of the biggest business shifts is the move to mobile technologies. This isn’t just changing marketing and user experiences but also changing companies’ operations as staff increasingly use their own smartphones and tablets to work.
Managing a shifting market
That shift though is not simple, as ZD Net reports Facebook’s move to ‘mobile first’ was a tough path in the words of the company’s senior engineer Adam Wolff.
“I think everyone would say it was worth it, but it was extremely painful,” Wolff admitted, explaining each sub-team was building in their own ways because there was no one to crossover with necessary knowledge.
Facebook has probably been the most successful company is dealing with the mobile shift and their difficulties despite their massive resources show just how difficult it is for companies to change not just their technology, but their business processes and in many cases the entire mindset of the organisation.
Those pain points in transitioning between ways of doing business is where opportunities lie, for VMWare they are seeing IT departments struggling with the development and deployment of apps along with the security risks of staff bringing their own mobile devices.
Happy coincidences
For VMWare, this is a happy coincidence in that their main business of computer virtualisation is as much at risk from the shift to cloud computing and mobile applications as any other business. By offering the tools for companies to manage that shift, they can retain their place in the market.
The threat though is this space has many other contenders – not least Facebook itself with its open source React platform the company developed out of its experiences in developing its mobile product.
One of the strengths VMWare has is being an incumbent, which is why they are pushing their ‘hybrid cloud’ offerings where companies use both their own data centres along with the public cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Stuck with sunk costs
For large corporates with huge sunk costs in their own infrastructure and those with security or operational reasons for keeping some of their functions in house that hybrid strategy makes sense as it’s unlikely any board or CIO is going to happily burn their existing systems and process down and go to a ‘pure cloud’ or mobile strategy.
While catering to that market is lucrative for the moment, the longer term risk is that the next wave of large corporations – and today’s high growth businesses – are pure cloud companies.
For the companies catering to the old ways of doing business, for the short term there’s profits to be made in the pain points from an evolving marketplace but in the long term it’s how well businesses are placed for the world the end of that transition that will guarantee their survival.
The process facing software companies like VMWin dealing with as business shifts is a challenge faced by almost all industries, the question is how to adapt to a very changed way of working.