Jean Philippe Barleaza, VP Partners, Alliance and General Business EMEA, VMware
Earlier this year three quarters of CIOs named app modernization as a top priority, but at the same time almost 48% of executives admitted it had been over a year since they’d made improvements to their app portfolios. Why?
The reality is that most large enterprises today have millions of lines of existing code that are very difficult to maintain and change. And this is starting to pose big questions: how can I extend the value of my existing software investment to benefit from the advantages of modern software delivery and operation? How can I simplify the way I run and manage modernized workloads alongside existing software? How can I get to production more often with new customer experiences?
Answers to these questions lie in VMware Tanzu, and its ability to bring development and operations teams together in completely new ways that deliver transformative business results. In answering these questions, we are providing the next great opportunity for enterprises and, therefore, the next great opportunity for our partners.
Intrigued? Let’s take a closer look at the five reasons why VMware Tanzu is so exciting for us and our partner community:
1. It brings relevancy to every organisation
The future of business differentiation and customer-facing services begins and ends with an organisation’s app portfolio. That’s why, regardless of the industry, commercial success lies in building new revenue-generating customer experiences via applications.
Taking this down a level; IDC predicts that, by 2025, nearly two thirds of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code deployed daily, more than 90% of apps will be cloud native, and there will be 1.6 times more developers than today. Specifically, it’s containerization that has been a game-changer for developers, that enables them to create and deploy apps faster and at unprecedented scale. Here, Kubernetes is leading the charge; currently, 86% of containerized apps are on Kubernetes.
Enter Tanzu, which can transform applications and infrastructure in a way that’s right for each organisation. If your customer’s first priority is to build better software faster, then you – with Tanzu – can help modernize the applications that matter most and automate the path to production. On the infrastructure side, you can help establish a unified operating model for virtual machines and containers within the customer’s private cloud. And then make it easy to extend that consistent operating model across clouds, taking full advantage of Kubernetes.
2. It makes it simple for businesses, when the time is right
The reality is that some businesses are more ready for Kubernetes than others. So, in this era of modernizing apps, there must be a greater focus on making Kubernetes ‘enterprise consumable’ – delivering developer-ready capabilities to ensure that it is easy to implement and scale when the time is right.
Through our Tanzu strategy, we’ve done this by bringing Kubernetes to the 70 million+ workloads already running on vSphere. This provides the fastest way to get started with Kubernetes – through the familiar environment and interface of vSphere, businesses can configure an enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure leveraging their existing networking and storage in as little as an hour and realise simple, fast, self-service provisioning of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters in just a few minutes.
3. It unlocks speed as a competitive differentiator
The current path to production comprises many pieces, and developers have to navigate many steps to get their code into production. It’s full of friction that slows down development cycles. But VMware Tanzu can pull everything together into an integrated and automated path, so developers can write five lines of code to push their software into production, including all dependencies and, crucially, accounting for security.
Improving developer capacity in this way ultimately means the organization can deliver better software, faster. That means more revenue generating features, faster patches and happier customers.
4. It brings Dev and Ops together with a single source of truth
Eighty-seven percent of business and IT decision makers agree that greater alignment among stakeholders involved in software development leads to more successful digital transformation. VMware and our partners are in a unique position to help Dev and Ops work better together in a shared effort to deliver great software continuously.
For example, if your customer wants to embrace containers, VMware Tanzu enables operators to curate a secure set of container images that are grab-and-go for developers, speeding development and delivery. And VMware Pivotal Labs can help modernize apps and infrastructure in weeks, not months, and create a culture shift that lasts.
Alongside this, there’s the opportunity to bring everything together into one complete picture of the stack – centralised visibility and management, and the ability to ingest all data sources and apply analytics and then route results to the right person. With this, infrastructure leaders can see the health of their environments, and developers can see the behaviour of their apps in production. Everyone makes better decisions, together.
5. It delivers genuine value as trusted partners
To make the above a reality, and capitalise on the opportunity at hand, partners must marry technical expertise with professional consultancy to help organisations streamline application modernization efforts.
After all, this requires more than just technology. And it is trusted partners that can best help their customers to bring together Dev and Ops teams, ensuring the organisation has the right platform, catering for all clouds with consistent operations, but also the right culture to deliver better software to production, continuously.
With this, our partners can help enterprises connect the dots and turn their app modernization aspirations into a reality, successfully enabling the organisational shift towards app-centricity to drive business growth.
