Wall Street talks VMware down, key executives exit and industry pundits continue to pile at the criticism. But VMware can get better from this down cycle, if it specializes in its identity as a supplier of fundamental data center software.

EvercoreWealth Management analyst Kirk Materne recently downgraded VMware’s target stock price from $85 to $75 due to uncertainty over VMware’s ability to compete with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and OpenStack.

It wasn’t see you later ago that VMware posted a value of $103. In a year when technology stocks are generally up, VMware is down 25%.

Comments inside the general press on VMware’s future also are more skeptical, after they aren’t downright dubious, including this recent GigaOm article, “VMware’s Hot Seat Getting Hotter By The Minute.”

i am not resistant to the signs that spur these comments. But i will say, without claim to omniscience, that they are potentially overwrought.

The view behind lots of them is that lower-priced substitutes for VMware at the moment are available inside the enterprise, while its efforts to go out into the cloud are sputtering or going nowhere.

Reviewers are confusing the slow progress of VMware’s overarching ambitions with the core strength of the corporate. To me, VMware can fail at becoming a public cloud supplier and still remain a robust software supplier. There are people inside VMware who would disagree with me on that. But immediately, the financial community and the click are simply taking VMware an excessive amount of at its word that it should be a dominant player in cloud computing.

In addition they take it at its word that it must become a software-defined networking vendor, that it should produce the software-defined data center — and achieve this immediately. We’re attempting to convert what must be a marathon right into a 100-yard dash.

What is the worst that could happen if VMware only begrudgingly succeeds, or maybe fails, at providing the software to power dozens or hundreds of public cloud data centers? Will its whole vCloud Hybrid Service initiative collapse, consisting of its prospects for the long run? Not necessarily.

VMware probably want to “own” the enterprise cloud compute task a similar way that it dominates the guts of the virtualized data center. It’s, if its products are managing the job within the enterprise data center, then those products should follow when the job moves to the cloud. This can be the thinking that builds software dynasties.

One only must ponder Microsoft’s expansion from owning the desktop operating system to owning the desktop application suite, or Oracle’s move from owning the database to owning the applications that use the database. Every software company believes it must expand relentlessly from its core to increasingly of the customer’s infrastructure … or what? It is going to wither and die? On this sense, every software company is an empire builder.

If it’s true in business that good health is linked to expansion, there is no truth whatsoever — in business or anywhere else — that the inaccurate type of expansion is related to agility. For VMware, agility in capitalizing on its ownership of information center virtualization is what’s called for now. VMware owns 80% of the market among those occupied with virtualization, in line with this analysis from Core Equity Research.

VMware’s recent product moves show it has plenty of potential left for managing that new environment. Sliding a hypervisor in between the operating system and hardware converts the info center into something that it wasn’t before. Each device, in place of being a concrete block, becomes a fluid, mercurial asset that may be reconfigured at the fly by software. Get enough operational intelligence into the software, and the device will start being utilized at 60% or 70% in place of 15%. The complete data center starts to hum.

VMware should want to follow the workload outside the enterprise data center, but it surely doesn’t need to. If it focuses contained in the data center, that does not mean its customers can have nowhere to show for cloud computing. It means only that the workload could be converted from a VMware virtual machine file into someone else’s, a superbly plausible, logical way for the tip user to navigate the movement into the cloud. Meaning, obviously, someone else’s virtual machine formatting and hypervisor may be used once the workload gets there. So what?