Can Avaya succeed as a computing vendor? With the data center market in transition, there is an opportunity there.

VMWorld 2012 this week featured every major computing vendor present to show their wares to over 20,000 attendees. This included the expected list of companies–Dell, Cisco, EMC, Brocade, HP and Avaya. That’s right, do a double take, that’s Avaya, the former company of Bell heads that makes phone systems and sells call center software. In cause you haven’t noticed, though, this is a whole new Avaya. Since Kevin Kennedy became CEO, the company has gone through a significant transformation. In actuality, CEO Lou D’Ambrosio started the transformation of Avaya, but Kennedy has accelerated it.

In addition to the traditional phone stuff that we’ve come to know and love from Avaya, and Aura, the collaboration software platform, the company added a broad data portfolio through the acquisition of Nortel. It also has a great developer program with DevConnect (kudos to Eric Rossman for the great work here) which was bolstered by ACE (Agile Communication Environment), also added with the Nortel deal. Avaya recently acquired Radvision to add video, and it entered the client computing market with its Avaya Desktop Video Device (with the Flare Experience user interface). And now, at VMWorld, the company launched its data center “stack” called “Collaboration Pod”.

Earlier this year, Riverbed released a product known as the “Granite Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure (VSI)” to optimize the performance of many of the applications that it’s core product, Steelhead, does not. 

For those not familiar with the differences between Steelhead and Granite, the traditional Steelhead product optimizes the performance of file-based applications, such as Word and Exchange, through a number of acceleration technologies such as compression and TCP optimization.  Granite addresses block level applications such as database and virtual machines. 

While the continued growth of Steelhead demonstrated that there were a number of “killer apps” for it, the killer application for Granite was not obvious, since there aren’t that many block storage based applications run in the data center. 

This year’s VMWorld kicks off this week in San Francisco and I’m expecting the typical huge audience.  One of the reasons why VMWorld has become the premier show that is has is because virtualization itself is changing.  Virtualization used to be a tactical technology used to consolidate servers.  Have 10 servers?  Consolidate that down to one or two.  The architecture fundamentally stays the same, just fewer physical boxes. 

Virtualization today though is a much more strategic technology.  It powers the cloud, desktops are being virtualized, storage is being virtualized and data center operations are being automated.  However, being more aggressive with virtualization does bring some new risks to enterprise IT.  To understand what some of these are, ZK Research and Xangati, a cloud and management solutions provider, recently ran a survey looking at where companies were with cloud deployments, where they were going and what the challenges were for future deployments.

Brocade last week released its quarterly earnings and also announced that long time CEO Mike Klayko would be resigning his position at the company.  This ends a lengthy tenure for Klayko who joined Brocade in 2003, through the acquisition of Rhapsody, and then was named CEO in 2005.  

One of the questions I’ve been asked often is what kind of CEO should Brocade hire to replace the flamboyant Klayko?  I think the incoming CEO needs to be a nuts and bolts person with good operational strengths and also someone with a channel background to continue what Klayko put into motion.  Despite the flat stock price over the past several years, it’s hard to argue the company isn’t well positioned to take advantage of current trends such as cloud computing and virtualization. 

To understand why I feel that way, let’s look back at the Klayko tenure and the positives and negatives which put Brocade in the position it’s in now. 

This article in Forbes contends that all of the .coms, or at least those of reasonable length, are used up. The article also contends that the best solution to the perceived lack of .com global top-level domain names (GTLD) is to use a .me extension, which got me thinking of ICANN’s announcement back in June that it had received almost 2,000 requests for generic TLDs for categories such as .hotel, .web and .blog.

As much as this seems like a good idea, I really think these alternate top-level domain names will remain an augmentation to what companies are already using or registered for very niche offerings. The thought behind the expansion of the GTLDs from the traditional .com, .net, .etc, and all of the country codes is that companies or groups of companies would use these. For example, Ford Motors might choose to have URLs such as car.ford or truck.ford, or perhaps the group might choose to use a naming convention such as ford.cars and gm.cars, something that might make accessing these sites more intuitive.