Microsoft hungry to eat VMWare's lunch | Beyond Binary - CNET News

Microsoft hungry to eat VMWare's lunch | Beyond Binary - CNET News: "'VMware is asking many of you to sign three-year license agreements for your virtualization projects,' Microsoft vice president Brad Anderson writes in an open letter to VMware customers. 'But with the arrival of cloud computing, signing up for a three-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 hopes to make the case that VMWare's approach centers on virtualization as a cost-saving means rather than in the broader shift of data from being stored in a company's own data center into one in which data is stored both locally and on a third-party's cloud-based service.

'Virtualization, while a necessary component of a move to the cloud, isn't by itself sufficient,' Microsoft's Amy Barzdukas told CNET in a telephone interview on Monday. Microsoft talks about how it is moving all of its major server products to being offered as both server software and hosted cloud-based services."