LAS VEGAS – As VMware Inc. officially kicks off its VMworld 2016 event this week, it is becoming clear that the company best known for its virtualization products is one in transition.
Transition would be an understatement: as its parent company EMC Corp. prepares to be swallowed up by Dell, VMware is looking to redefine itself in a changing IT landscape.
With this in mind, here are two things to know about VMware this week:
The company is refining its cloud strategy
Known for its virtualization software products that enables businesses to better manage workloads on servers, the company has been making a hard shift toward the cloud computing model. CEO Pat Gelsinger has noted that its customers are preoccupied with three issues: security, cloud and mobility.
Customer-driven technologies, the shift of on-premises to off-premise, the disruptive effects of mobile and cloud technologies “are all coming together and changing business models from perpetual to subscription and are creating violent shifts that everyone needs to navigate to get to the other side,” he said in Toronto earlier this year.
As a result, it is positioning itself and its products as a management and security layer for cloud infrastructures — putting itself directly in competition with vendors such as Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp. and Amazon.com.
VMware is also extending its cloud portfolio
At VMworld, the company is recognizing that enterprises are increasingly moving towards running business apps and services on managed data centre servers instead of on-premises. On Monday, it unveiled its VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture, a framework it notes is an extension of its hybrid cloud strategy.
The announcements include:
• VMware Cloud Foundation, a unified SDDC platform that enables customers to manage and run traditional or cloud-native applications on SDDC clouds
• VMware vCloud Availability, a new family of disaster recovery offerings purpose built for vCloud Air Network partners
• A new release of VMware vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager to provide VMware vSphere users “zero downtime application migration” to VMware vCloud Air.
“Customers are increasingly relying on multiple public and private clouds to run their applications, but are daunted by the challenge of managing and securing applications across diverse cloud platforms,” said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president and general manager, Software-Defined Data Centre Division, VMware, in a statement.
VMware will provide a “preview” of its cross-cloud offerings
The Cross-Cloud Architecture will allow customers to run, manage, connect, and secure applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment, according to the company. The “Technology Preview” around its cross-cloud offerings at VMworld will include:
• Discovery and Analytics: enabling discovery, onboarding, and governance of public cloud applications;
• Compliance and Security: using micro-segmentation and monitoring to provide security and compliance for applications across clouds;
• Deployment and Migration: providing developers the ability to work cross-cloud, and IT the ability to manage cross-cloud applications with security and compliance.
Keep watching ITWorldCanada.com for more VMworld 2016 updates this week.
