Q&A: VMware chief talks x86, Oracle, careers

Paul Maritz, VMware Inc.'s recently appointed CEO and president, believes history is on the side of x86 hardware, and said users running on RISC-based platforms will eventually migrate away from it. He also said that Oracle's lack of support for its applications running in virtualized environments is a "challenge," but says all the other large vendors supporting virtualization and eventually, he suspects, Oracle will face this tide of change, he said, in an interview with Computerworld at VMworld.

There's been a lot speculation about the threat that Microsoft poses -- with its release of its Hyper-V virtualization -- to VMware, but conversely what kind of opportunity does it create? If the market is still relatively small and Microsoft is increasing the awareness of virtualization, doesn't that help you?

In a certain way it does. Microsoft had a press event last Monday where they basically, in my opinion, did us a favor endorsing all the features that we had and said we're going to do all of these but we dont have them all yet. That's an opportunity. I think it will certainly cause people to really think about the need to have a strategy for virtualization. That does open up an opportunity for us to have a dialog with those customers.

Regarding the pricing of your products and increased competition in your market, you said this week at the conference that "every vendor has to deal with reality of the competition." Can you elaborate?

Every vendor, typically, has multiple price points. You have the high-end, mid-range and low priced products, what one is typically trying to do is to make sure you have new features coming in at the high end and overtime you move features down the waterfall of the pricing point in order to both stay competitive and broaden the reach of customers. I'm expecting that we will obey the laws of gravity.

What's your take on the future of RISC-based systems as x86 hardware gets more capable?

At this point, we've decided to remain focused in terms of core virtualization technology on the x86 architecture. As far as we can tell, most customers and vendors -- while they continue to have a significant element of RISC in their environments -- all of them are thinking about a migration strategy. We are content to stay within the x86 space and see that play out.

So how will it play out? Will x86 replace RISC?

Replace might be too strong a word, but x86 has and will continue gain market share versus RISC. Yesterday I was looking at an IBM machine that has eight Dunnington [Intel Xeon's six-core chip] processors. That's 48 core machine fitting into the size of small suitcase.