Zimbra

Reducing IT complexity has been a goal for many enterprises for the past few years. As is typical of a trend, many factors contribute to this desire to simplify today’s IT infrastructures, systems and applications that have created a complex mix of vendors addressing multiple issues.

As a result, simplicity as a key message in product positioning seems to be spreading. In the last few days alone a handful of announcements have prominently incorporated IT simplicity.

Yesterday HP and Microsoft Corp. announced a three-year agreement to “invest $250 million to significantly simplify technology environments for businesses of all sizes.”

According to a written statement, the companies expect to deliver new solutions that will:

• be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model;
• advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation; and
• eliminate complexities of IT management and automate existing manual processes to lower overall costs.

The companies say the reason for the agreement is to improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments.

Tuesday’s announcement from VMware of its intent to purchase Zimbra from Yahoo! also pushed the theme of simplicity. Steve Herrod, chief technology officer for VMware, used a form of the term simple (simplify, simplicity, simpler) at least a dozen times in his blog talking about the acquisition.

Herrod writes: “VMware’s mission is to simplify IT, and every VMware product focuses on attacking the complexity and rigidity that has crept into this world. In many ways we see the excitement over cloud computing to be a longing for a simpler, more flexible way of doing computing. The VMware strategy is to help customers achieve cloud-like efficiency and operational improvements across the major IT infrastructure investment areas. To date this strategy has involved products and services targeting complexity in datacenter infrastructure (e.g. VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter Server), desktops (e.g. VMware View and VMware Fusion), and application development (e.g. SpringSource, VMware Lab Manager, and VMware Workstation). With this acquisition, we will extend our focus into email and collaboration, one of the core services (along with areas such as file and print services and identity management) that IT departments universally provide to their users.”

As IT infrastructures age while budgets constrict, the appeal for IT organizations to re-think and simplify in 2010 will only grow. It will be interesting to see if the vendor promises of simplification truly translate to increased productivity and better IT management.