Expect Software Defined Splash at VMWorld

Jim Rapoza

There are sure to be plenty of new technologies and products debuting at next week’s VMWorld conference in San Francisco. But one technology trend that attendees should expect to hear quite a bit of is Software Defined Data Centers.

I can hear the complaints already. Wait Jim, what’s this thing? Is it like Software Defined Networking? I’m just kinda of starting to figure that out and now there’s something new?

Sorry to say it but, yes, it is something new that you’ll need to figure out for your organization’s technology needs and, while it has some elements of SDN, it is also in many ways quite different.

Basically, Software Defined Data Centers (or SDCC) are created by taking all of the new networking and data center technologies of the last several years and combining them to create a new dynamic and flexible data center architecture. So server virtualization, storage virtualization, public private and hybrid cloud and SDN are all mixed together to form a new type of data center.

So in an SDCC, everything is programmable, dynamic, software-based and on-demand. Whatever is needed for a data center can be created on the fly, provisioned on an as needed basis and used wherever and whenever. From servers to storage to the networks they run on, everything becomes software that can be flexibly deployed.

If you’ve read my past work, you’ll know that I’m pretty bullish when it comes to Software Defined Networking. But while I also see a lot of potential for SDCC, businesses need to be aware of the many ways that these will be positioned and potentially limited by vendors.

There’s a lot of leeway for vendors to say that they have an SDCC offering that really only handles a couple of the elements. More concerning, there is quite a bit of potential to create locked infrastructures that only provide SDCC capabilities when a customer uses products from a single vendor.

That would be a major problem as, like SDN, the greatest benefits of SDCC will be found in fully open and fully flexible deployments.

So enjoy VMWorld in San Francisco next week. And get ready for your data center’s software defined future.

Jim Rapoza is Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

No Escalations ≠ No Work: Why Visibility in DevOps Matters More Now That AI Is Accelerating Everything

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

Observability Costs Rising Faster Than Value

The gap is widening between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures, according to The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a report from Imply ...

Customers Demand Frictionless Experiences - This Is How Retailers Can Provide Them

Seamless shopping is a basic demand of today's boundaryless consumer — one with little patience for friction, limited tolerance for disconnected experiences and minimal hesitation in switching brands. Customers expect intuitive, highly personalized experiences and the ability to move effortlessly across physical and digital channels within the same journey. Failure to deliver can cost dearly ...

IT's Motivation Crisis Is Really a Process Crisis

If your best engineers spend their days sorting tickets and resetting access, you are wasting talent. New global data shows that employees in the IT sector rank among the least motivated across industries. They're under a lot of pressure from many angles. Pressure to upskill and uncertainty around what agentic AI means for job security is creating anxiety. Meanwhile, these roles often function like an on-call job and require many repetitive tasks ...

Expect Software Defined Splash at VMWorld

Jim Rapoza

There are sure to be plenty of new technologies and products debuting at next week’s VMWorld conference in San Francisco. But one technology trend that attendees should expect to hear quite a bit of is Software Defined Data Centers.

I can hear the complaints already. Wait Jim, what’s this thing? Is it like Software Defined Networking? I’m just kinda of starting to figure that out and now there’s something new?

Sorry to say it but, yes, it is something new that you’ll need to figure out for your organization’s technology needs and, while it has some elements of SDN, it is also in many ways quite different.

Basically, Software Defined Data Centers (or SDCC) are created by taking all of the new networking and data center technologies of the last several years and combining them to create a new dynamic and flexible data center architecture. So server virtualization, storage virtualization, public private and hybrid cloud and SDN are all mixed together to form a new type of data center.

So in an SDCC, everything is programmable, dynamic, software-based and on-demand. Whatever is needed for a data center can be created on the fly, provisioned on an as needed basis and used wherever and whenever. From servers to storage to the networks they run on, everything becomes software that can be flexibly deployed.

If you’ve read my past work, you’ll know that I’m pretty bullish when it comes to Software Defined Networking. But while I also see a lot of potential for SDCC, businesses need to be aware of the many ways that these will be positioned and potentially limited by vendors.

There’s a lot of leeway for vendors to say that they have an SDCC offering that really only handles a couple of the elements. More concerning, there is quite a bit of potential to create locked infrastructures that only provide SDCC capabilities when a customer uses products from a single vendor.

That would be a major problem as, like SDN, the greatest benefits of SDCC will be found in fully open and fully flexible deployments.

So enjoy VMWorld in San Francisco next week. And get ready for your data center’s software defined future.

Jim Rapoza is Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

No Escalations ≠ No Work: Why Visibility in DevOps Matters More Now That AI Is Accelerating Everything

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

Observability Costs Rising Faster Than Value

The gap is widening between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures, according to The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a report from Imply ...

Customers Demand Frictionless Experiences - This Is How Retailers Can Provide Them

Seamless shopping is a basic demand of today's boundaryless consumer — one with little patience for friction, limited tolerance for disconnected experiences and minimal hesitation in switching brands. Customers expect intuitive, highly personalized experiences and the ability to move effortlessly across physical and digital channels within the same journey. Failure to deliver can cost dearly ...

IT's Motivation Crisis Is Really a Process Crisis

If your best engineers spend their days sorting tickets and resetting access, you are wasting talent. New global data shows that employees in the IT sector rank among the least motivated across industries. They're under a lot of pressure from many angles. Pressure to upskill and uncertainty around what agentic AI means for job security is creating anxiety. Meanwhile, these roles often function like an on-call job and require many repetitive tasks ...