VMware Launches New Multi-Cloud Platform
VMware unveiled a new distributed, multi-cloud platform this week designed to help its customers simplify the adoption and operation of multi-cloud environments.
The pitch for the new VMware Cloud is aimed at both software developers and IT operators. The platform is designed to boost the productivity of devs by enabling them to build and deploy to any cloud. The platform also gives IT the ability to modernize infrastructure and operations with better economics and less risk.
VMware Cloud brings its customers what the company calls "a more integrated experience," via the new Cloud Console, a single monitoring and management environment for VMware Cloud infrastructure, regardless of where it’s deployed; the App Navigator, a new tool for assessing and prioritizing application transformation initiatives across an application estate based on the value of each app; and VMware Cloud Universal , a flexible subscription that simplifies the purchase and consumption of VMware multi-cloud infrastructure and management services.
VMware has been heading for some version of this offering for years—20 of them, more or less. The company justifiably claims some huge numbers: 300,000 organizations have built and run more than 85 million workloads on VMware, and more than 5 million developers have built apps on its technology.
“We are on the cusp of the next evolution of cloud and apps," said VMware COO Raghu Raghuram, in a statement. "Architectures are becoming distributed and increasingly multi-cloud, while modern applications will soon outnumber traditional apps. The challenge for any CIO is to take advantage of this new innovation without introducing more complexity and risk."
VMware Cloud is the solution for this challenge, Raghuram said. It's the only cloud solution that customers can use today in the datacenter and on any cloud to "accelerate their modernization journey with speed, simplicity, and better security."
The company's pitch for the new platform aside, Raghuram offered a great observation about the impact of the quarantine on demand for these kinds of cloud from the enterprise in a blog post.
"Today we see incredible demand for digital-first services," he wrote, "from telemedicine to distance learning to touchless systems in retail and financial services. Nearly three-fourths of businesses we surveyed are expanding their investment in new services that engage customers or support what is now a long-term remote workforce with the tools to be productive. It’s one of the reasons why we see cloud adoption accelerating faster than ever, with cloud deployments expected to grow by 26%. And even more interesting, why businesses are investing so heavily in app modernization. In fact, of the organizations we’ve studied this year, 90% of executives are prioritizing migration and modernization of their legacy apps. The message is clear: the apps and services powering businesses today simply must evolve to meet the needs of the business in the future."
And there's an opportunity here for developers.
"We see a model for cloud that is both increasingly distributed and diverse – with apps deployed across a range of public clouds, within the data center and at the edge – but unified with centralized management and operations, centralized governance and security," he wrote. "This distributed multi-cloud model delivers the flexibility to build and run any application in the best environment, and access to the vast array of innovation from cloud providers, along with a unified model for security and operations at the level every enterprise demands."
That model, Raghuram said, is at the heart of the VMware Cloud platform.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 31, 2021