The impact of cloud computing continues to grow. From changing the way applications are built, run, managed and delivered, to delivering new levels of agility for IT, to continually evolving how IT operates.
More than ever, cloud is being adopted to serve the demanding needs of applications. Our businesses depend on apps to drive revenue and operations, connect with customers and make employees as effective as possible. Enterprise applications have never been more demanding. And our expectations of applications continue to grow. This increases the need for underlying infrastructure that gives each app exactly what it needs. And as massive scalability, data and analytics, machine learning and edge solutions become increasingly mainstream, these demands will only increase.
Customers have a range of paths for their app portfolio. From maintaining existing apps in a highly-virtualized data center, to replatforming them in a cloud, refactoring them to be cloud native or just developing a new cloud native application based on containers and microservices.
With these paths comes a set of cloud initiatives. There’s still significant room for improvement in the traditional data center. Continuing to modernize this infrastructure not only brings added capacity and efficiency, but it helps to integrate on-premises investments into a broader and more cohesive cloud strategy. We’re also seeing incredible interest in expansion initiatives, tapping into public cloud services that have a common infrastructure that minimizes the effort of refactoring apps for cloud. And of course enterprises are aggressively developing new applications for cloud.
What VMware’s customers tell us is that they want the freedom to develop any type of application based on what the business is demanding. They also want the flexibility to deploy that application to any type of cloud infrastructure, from their private cloud to a range of global public cloud service providers. And in today’s mobile world, delivering these apps to any type of device securely and reliably is standard.
The challenge customers are finding is that this flexibility and choice often has unintended consequences. Each new cloud solution brings with it unique architectures, inconsistent security models, heterogeneous user policies and management tools. All of this is more to manage and master. At the least this can be a drain on efficiency while introducing unexpected costs. At worst, the security of intellectual property and customer information could be threatened.
Last year at VMworld 2016, we presented our customers with a broad and more ambitious vision for cloud. We took what we learned supporting over 500,000 customers around the globe and the expertise VMware has supporting the infrastructure needs of the most demanding applications in the enterprise. Today we’re marking a significant milestone as the core set of products, services and solutions come to market. At the same time, we’re adding new strategic partners to our portfolio, helping to bring VMware’s innovation to market through a wide range of service providers and channels. This strategy, innovation, ecosystem of partners and community efforts now falls under VMware Cloud, a unification of our efforts across VMware.
At the core of our portfolio is a simple concept. IT needs to continually increase agility to accelerate time to market for new apps and services, rapidly adopt new services and manage costs. But it can’t increase complexity and risk. VMware is helping to solve this paradox by delivering:
Consistent Infrastructure: core building blocks of cloud computing – compute, storage, networking – deployed as VMware Cloud Foundation within the data center and more than 4,000 cloud services providers globally. We base this all on the same SDDC technologies you’ve been deploying in your data center, the most trusted and widely deployed enterprise infrastructure.
Consistent Operations: essential operational capabilities to deliver visibility, operations, automation, security and governance to properly manage and operate their systems and apps, even across multiple cloud environments. These are core IT requirements. But as heterogeneous cloud services enter the enterprise, IT is finding it more and more challenging to deliver on these requirements.
Through consistent infrastructure you have greater freedom to adopt cloud services knowing that they will deliver interoperability and across clouds and allow you to freely choose which cloud service is right for you. And with consistent operations, you have greater assurance that all of your cloud investments are running properly, governed effectively and secure.
To support our VMware Cloud strategy, we’ve announced an impressive set of new products and services that allow customers to run, manage, connect and secure any application across clouds and devices. These cloud services take advantage of VMware’s unparalleled expertise supporting more than 500,000 global customers running some of the most demanding enterprise production applications.
For more on our cloud services and products, visit cloud.vmware.com
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