Every customer I speak with is on a multi-cloud journey. As businesses build a strategy for how they support an increasingly complex set of applications and set a direction for adopting new capabilities like machine and artificial intelligences, containers and Kubernetes, they are increasingly finding a path across two primary models for cloud: Hybrid Cloud and Native Public Cloud.
While each model is unique, they are complementary, existing simultaneously within the same customer and sharing at their core the common drive to deliver innovative services back to the business in a way that is unique and differentiating.
Each of these models is distinguished by its own set of consumers, priorities and technical requirements. While each represent unique opportunities for the business, this journey is creating a complex intersection of challenges for businesses. This year at VMworld we’re making a massive investment in solutions that address the entire spectrum of the multi-cloud journey, advancing the hybrid cloud opportunities for customers and addressing the needs of native public cloud operations. Let’s dive into each model and how VMware can help you succeed.
Hybrid Cloud
Gone are the days of data center modernization just for the sake of building a highly efficient yet isolated silo. While the gains of a highly efficient data center are clear – maximizing the utilization of owned systems, delivering highly automated environments to support the demands placed on IT operations. It has been superseded by the value of having a fully operational hybrid cloud, integrated and interoperable with public cloud services. The core foundation of hybrid cloud is the consistent infrastructure – compute, storage, networking – along with consistent operations of cloud management that spans this environment.
Customers now have the ability to leverage these two environments as a single pool of resources like never before. Customers are making massive investments in cloud migration for apps and entire data centers, along with on demand scale for disaster recovery, regional expansion and seasonal/cyclical spikes in resources. These were previously impossible to fulfill or at a minimum costly and time consuming to achieve due to the massive diversity in architectures between the data center and the cloud.
VMware has broken through these barriers by making available our VMware Cloud Foundation. This is the essential and ubiquitous technology foundation for hybrid cloud both in the data center and as part of our efforts to drive infrastructure transformation with global cloud providers. The core infrastructure and management within VMware Cloud Foundation gives you everything you need to support business critical applications in a private cloud and with cloud providers like IBM Cloud, and more than 4,200 cloud providers operating in over 120 countries worldwide.
With this you can now have the confidence that these environments are compatible and optimized to support your applications. And you can have the choice of the environment that suits your needs for geographic coverage, expertise in applications or verticals, or unique value-added services offer by the cloud providers. We’ve seen these cloud providers deliver more and more new innovations on top of the VMware Cloud Foundation and we couldn’t be more excited about what this means for our customers.
And of course, we have a very unique offering with VMware Cloud on AWS. Since launching a year ago it has been near nonstop innovation to give you the best hybrid cloud solution offering from our two companies. Now live in all major global geographies, VMware Cloud on AWS offers you perhaps the most complete hybrid cloud solution, jointly engineered with AWS and running on their world class global cloud. You can read all of the exciting details of the M5 release of this solution.
This year we’re expanding the definition of hybrid cloud to support new Edge compute use cases. By extending VMware Cloud Foundation across the private cloud, public cloud and edge, we’re creating a broad yet consistent infrastructure for businesses to run and manage applications. Today we’re introducing Project Dimension, a solution that we think will unlock considerable new opportunities for customers across a number of key industries. You can read the details and thorough deep dive here.
What’s most important about this hybrid model is the way that private, public and edge will all help to reinforce and accelerate each other. The cloud will reinforce and reshape the data center, just as the innovations we’ve delivered over the last 20 years will reinforce and reshape the cloud. And the Edge breaks new ground on how all of this incredible power can be delivered and managed as a service. Each of these environments are powerful and exceptional on their own. But together we’re unlocking massive new opportunities for the market.
Native Public Cloud
Turning our attention to the native public cloud segment of the multi-cloud journey, we see a market ripe with opportunities and challenges. The growth of the cloud is phenomenal. And the impact has been undeniable. But as businesses naturally adopt multiple sources of cloud computing, we see customers struggle with complexity, loss of efficiency and risks to security and privacy.
This growth and diversity in native public cloud adoption has been driven by two primary sets of priorities: developers seeking access to the nearly limitless compute power and by IT organizations seeking global reach for cloud services while balancing cost models and vendor strategies. To both, the attraction of the access to innovation of cloud providers will continue to accelerated the growth of these services.
But with this comes the natural complexity of managing massive growth in accounts and architectures, tools and teams. To date, we haven’t had the same kind of unified cost and resource management, compliance and analytics that we enjoy within the hybrid cloud. Customers have been asking us for a unified Cloud Operations solution that strips away the complexity and diversity inherent in this market and allow them to more effectively deliver visibility, security and automation across any cloud, be it native AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud or others.
This is a challenge we’ve been addressing for some time. And today we’re announcing a significant advancement to that strategy with the acquisition of CloudHealth Technologies. I go into detail about CloudHealth Technologies here. But most importantly, we’ll be bringing together the investments we’ve made in Wavefront by VMware, Secure State (formerly CloudCoreo) and now CloudHealth to create a comprehensive portfolio for unified operations across Native Public Cloud.
Just as VMware eliminated the silos created by distinct compute, storage and networking technologies in the data center, we’re making a giant commitment to eliminate the silos being created in the native public cloud market. We think this will give you the flexibility give your developers access to the services they need and to choose the best cloud environment for your applications without having to introduce complexity or risk into your business.
Accelerating the Multi-Cloud Journey
There’s an incredible amount of news connected to cloud at VMworld this year. You can read the details here. But what’s really clear is the advancements VMware has made across this entire multi-cloud landscape. We think that the combination of VMware Cloud Foundation with all of our services and tools, new Edge initiatives and management environments will give you one of the broadest and most comprehensive portfolios for your Multi-Cloud Journey.
Tell us what you think. Where else should we be investing? And problems can we solve for you?
