Can VMware sales staff (mostly ex- Dell guys) pull of the trick?

This is an interesting, in fact very interesting from a strategic and tactical weakness perspective.

Here’s my problem with VMware in this situation. Ninety percent of the VMware sales organization is made up of former Dell employees. In fact there are so many ex-Dell sales people at VMware that they have had a self-imposed moratorium on hiring from Dell. As we know until recent years Dell was a very successful company. In fact they never had a layoff until 2001. For the first 16 years they were layoff free. Now those same sales people are at VMware and they have never experienced a downturn in sales or if they have they have not proven their ability to successfully fight their way out of it. I know several experienced sales people who are former Dell employees, but they in the minority.

Dell was the least expensive and that goes a long way to selling units in the PC world. When HP and others figured out a way to produce boxes as cheaply that’s when Dell started to lose. When you are the price leader people are willing to talk to you. When you are the only one with a solid product in an emerging market again people will be willing to talk to you. When you are neither the experience of your sales people shows very quickly.

And we all know that Microsoft sales are driving their business. So I fear about VMware's future. I'm not sure if we'll be seeing a VMware in the next 2-3 years. Things are changing dramatically.

I will soon be helping organize,and probably do a keynote myself, an EMEA Cloud Computing initiative. Suddenly there is a lot of talk of Xen and an overwhelming interest in KVM.

Too much is changing and a bit too fast. Believe me we would have forgotten Virtualization, like we forgot for a few decades till it touched the x86. So yes, as I said previously, market relevance is where VMware had its 5 years to invest in, did they do that effectively? We'll find out for soon in the coming 2-3 years.