The VMforce news we’ve reported on today makes it likely game for our weekly poll.
What we want to know is your view on how significant the VMforce platform will be for the market. The view from here: The alliance between Salesforce.com and VMware will depend on the Java developer community the two companies develop.
So, in your opinion, what does VMforce mean for competing vendors such as Google, Amazon, Oracle and SAP?
Dennis Howlett says it’s an opportunity for Salesforce.com to re-architect itself and position itself in the mid to high-end market:
“Both Oracle and SAP are substantial Java shops. There have been concerns among Java fans that somehow, Oracle would mess up the open source Java community. VMForce spikes that because if Oracle chooses to play fast and loose then VMForce could become a natural safe haven. SAP on the other hand has been conflicted over Java. Co-founder Hasso Plattner has said that he’d like to eliminate Java from SAP apps. That is neither realistic nor likely to happen. More recently, the company has been making fresh commitments to Java and Eclipse. Both SAP and VMForce/Salesforce.com like to talk about open-ness so this could present new opportunities for SAP developers to consider VMForce as a pathway to bringing cloud based apps into their environments where it makes sense to do so and where the VMForce platform provides what developers need.”
So what do you think? What does VMforce mean for competing vendors such as Google, Amazon, Oracle and SAP?
