Disclaimer: I am a VMware employee. This is my opinion, and has been my opinion for some time prior to joining the company. Anything I write on this blog may not be reflective of VMware’s strategy or their products.

With this weeks announcements from VMware, there has been a great deal of confusion on what made it into the release. So as not to add to it, I wanted to focus more on something you likely missed if you weren’t watching closely. As I said in the disclaimer, this is not a VMware specific post, but they do seem to be in the lead here.

For many years I was big on building management infrastructure. It was an easy gig as a consultant, it scales and it is fairly similar from environment to environment. Looking back, it is a little funny to think about how hardware vendors did this. First they sell you servers, then they sell you more servers to manage the servers they sold you, plus some software to monitor. When we built out virtual environments we did the same thing. It was great, we did less physical servers, but the concept was the same.

If you pay close attention to the trends with the larger cloud providers, we are seeing a big push toward hybrid cloud. Now this is not remarkable unless we look closer at management. The biggest value to hybrid cloud, used to be that we could burst workloads to the cloud. As more businesses move to some form of hybird cloud, it seems that the larger value is not being locked into on premise cloud management software.

At VMworld 2014, as well as during the launch this week, VMware touted their vCloud Air product. Whether you like the product or not, the thing that caught my eye is the outside model of management. Rather than standing up a management system inside the datacenter, simply lease the appropriate management systems and software. Don’t like your provider, great get another. Again I want to point out, I am using VMware as my example here, but there are others doing the same thing, just not on the same scale yet.

While this is not going to be right for everyone, we need to start rethinking how we manage our environments.  The times they are a changin.