VMware® vRealize™…. Really??

August 25th, 2014 |

Oh no. VMware just announced a huge change in names. I know “vCAC” wasn’t the best as in many languages CAC means… well you look it up. But vRealize… Really???

The new names convention: Everything vRealize™

Someone at VMware probably thought this was pretty neat. “Let’s change everything to vRealize™, yeah!!”. I’m not a fan. Well, let’s look at some old and new names:

ORIGINAL NAME	NEW NAME
VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite	VMware vRealize™ Operations™
VMware vCenter Operations Manager	VMware vRealize™ Operations Manager™
VMware vCloud Automation Center	VMware vRealize™ Automation™
VMware IT Business Management Suite	VMware vRealize™ Business™

Some Examples of the new VMware naming convention

Maybe it is me. I just don’t like the “vRealize” part. Looking through Google (on August 21st 2014), I found some nice pre-VMworld-leak too:

If you know the name... You could find this draft post that was withdrawn again. But Google knows...!

If you know the name… You could find this draft post that was withdrawn again. Google knows ALL…!

However, when I clicked that link, it seemed VMware did know what to respond:

VMware DID know the right response: Yes it is somewhat embarrassing.

Now to mix this with AIR

In addition to the vRealize™ stuff, we also have “Air” that saw the light of day a few days ago to basically rename everything that is “As A Service”. This adds to the naming convention. Now at least I know why I should make my slide decks 16:9 widescreen. I’ll just give some examples and you can guess the original products:

VMware vRealize™ Air™ Automation
VMware vRealize™ Air™ Business Enterprise
VMware vCloud® Air™ Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand
VMware vRealize™ Automation Advanced Public Cloud Extension™
VMware vCloud® Air™ Virtual Private Cloud

Yikes.

My 2 cents

Put simply, I don’t like the new naming convention. The words are in my opinion just not right, pronunciation is not fluent.

It looks like VMware is trying to get rid of all the abbreviations. While that is a good thing in itself, these long names will definitely cause them to be abbreviated once more in the field. Let’s look at how this will go down. If vCHS == “vee-cheese”, does vCloud Air become “vee-Care”?

One upshot of this, people will stop to call v-c-a-c “vee-cac” and “vee-cake”. But I’m guessing now the new acronym vRA will be pronounced “vee-rah”. Sounds like one of the bad guys in a comic strip or the geeky version of an American Marine.

And just now I just realized I need to re-certify as a “VMware vRealize Certified Professional”. Bummer.