Every tech firm is in the midst of a massive transition right now, as new developments in datacenter architecture redefine the way we store, manage, access and secure data.  For VMware, the shine of innovation has eroded, revealing a company that’s determined to maintain the head start earned with its revolutionary approach to virtualization. Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer predicts that VMware’s future will hinge on its ability to diversify and address new market trends.

Yesterday, Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman drew our attention to three markets that the virtualization will likely come to rely on in the coming years: converged infrastructure, VDI and heterogeneous environments, where “the benefits of the full VMware product suite can be strongly positioned.”  Floyer dug deeper into this last segment in his own piece, published just a few hours ago on the Wikibon blog.

Floyer believes that the VMware’s value proposition lies not in its hypervisor software, but rather in the set of management tools that it created to run on top.  Virtualization is quickly turning into a feature for many operating systems, he says, which means that the vendor will have to come up with something that sets its products apart from the underlying OS layer. This is easier said than done, but it’s far from impossible.

“The overall objective for VMware is to provide the basis for a software managed infrastructure, a set of services that can be applied as required to applications running on commodity hardware,” says Floyer. “The biggest threats to this are the hyper-scale organizations such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, OpenStack, Yahoo and three-letter acronym federal agencies, who would prefer a software-led infrastructure built on open-source products and open APIs.”

Achieving this goal is exactly why VMware acquired  Virsto earlier this week. The Sunnyvale, Calif-based startup offers a storage hypervisor that allows companies to manage their storage as it was a single, unified pool of resources. Floyer explained how the buy could help VMware become the Microsoft of the software-led infrastructure in an NewsDesk interview this morning.  See Floyer’s full analysis below.