Tuesday, October 11, 2011

1st Day at VMware

Today was my 1st day at VMware where I'll be working as a Product Manager on the Cloud Foundry team.  This tweet sums up my first day:


today was my first day at #vmware. 1st impressions: exciting, intense, active, great campus, vibrant, nice perks. #cfoundry fires me up.
Oct 11 via webFavoriteRetweetReply

I feel like the PaaS space is still very much in it's early days, somewhat like the application server market was in 1999 when I first started writing my first Servlets with WebSphere as a fresh out-of-school IBMer learning Java. VMware has assembled an incredibly talented team over the last few years to work in this area and has been doing lots of hiring lately like this example demonstrates.  In addition to the great people, VMware has a fantastic technology portfolio that is unburdened by a huge legacy middleware business that allows them to think differently and move with much more agility.  Do not misunderstand me, I believe Oracle, IBM, Redhat and other traditional middleware vendors will likely still have success selling traditional middleware in the short and mid-term, but I had to jump at this opportunity to be involved where I think the most innovation is and make my impact on this developing space that I think has great promise.

Thank you to everyone at Oracle for the kind words and emails.  I really appreciated my time there and at BEA Systems, made great friends and learned a lot.  I know that Java EE, Glassfish and WebLogic Server are in great hands and you will continue being successful.

If you want to learn more about what has me so excited about Cloud Foundry, there are several obvious paths.  One great aspect of Cloud Foundry is that it's hosted on github and Apache 2.0 licensed, so it's easy to get and review the code.  You can also download and use the complete package with a Micro Cloud Foundry virtual machine that you can run on a laptop, with a step-by-step example using Java or other languages and frameworks like Ruby.  You can also watch a video or two on youtube if you just want to see more about what it's all about.