By Milin Desai, Vice President of Products, NSBU

It feels like only yesterday when we started our journey into networking at VMware. Even from the early beginnings in 2011, it became clear to some of us that the abstraction and operations model of virtualization for compute and memory, which completely transformed the modern data center, was something we needed to extend to networking. We understood that that a network based on software and abstraction in the long run would extend beyond our customers’ data centers to public clouds and ultimately to the Edge.

We’ve been executing on this vision for almost eight years; reinventing data center networking and enabling our customers to be smarter about how they secure, manage and connect their applications and users.

Starting with the Data Center

The Nicira acquisition, alongside our internal innovations, resulted in the release of VMware NSX in 2013. VMware NSX made network virtualization a mainstream possibility for the data center. The goal was simple — abstract the application from the physical network and deliver the networking attributes in software at machine speeds. After four years, multiple thousands of customers and the creation of a billion-dollar run rate business, we have transformed the networking and security model in the data center. Customers are driving business value through increased automation, enhanced security and getting greater availability with application continuity leveraging NSX and our ecosystem.

 

The arrival of the Public Cloud

While on-premises data centers have been evolving to the software-defined data center, our customers have been working through another disruptive shift in IT – the emergence of  cloud. Applications that typically sit in the data center now are now delivered as software-as-a-service or run in public clouds. Understanding this trend, and with the mindset of delivering value for networking closest to the applications, we too have been working with our customers to address the networking and security changes brought about by the multi-cloud strategies we increasingly see in our customer base. We have been working in this area on three fronts:

  • First, we started with some of our VMware Cloud Provider partners, and empowered them to use NSX as a strategic lever to create new and differentiated offerings for their customers. Expedient, ARMOR, and iLand and others are now offering new security and DR-as-a-Service offerings based on NSX.
  • Next, we worked with some of our largest global Cloud Provider partners to make NSX a strategic component of complete SDDC service offerings. CenturyLink, Fujitsu, IBM Cloud, NTTcom, OVH and Rackspace all offer complete SDDC as a service offerings underpinned by NSX. Our networking stack is also a key differentiator to our own VMware Cloud™ on AWS
  • Finally, we are making NSX available as a cloud service to support applications running natively in leading public clouds, starting with AWS today, and in the future Azure. We are also working Google and Pivotal to deliver a Kubernetes-based container service Pivotal Container Service (PKS).

The Intelligent Edge: With VeloCloud, we will expand our approach to the WAN

The data center is no longer the central control point to enforce policy for networking and security control. The dynamics of distributed application above in conjunction with end users wanting improved experiences is changing how we connect end users to applications going forward.

 

As we move from a model of data centers to centers of data, it was the right time to execute on extending our approach to the wide-area network (WAN). With our announcement of our signing of a definitive agreement to acquire VeloCloud Networks, we will bring together a solution that will help us connect and secure islands of data with the same automation, security and visibility that we bring with NSX within each center of data.

Once closed, this acquisition will enable our customers with:

 

The time to engage is NOW

We revolutionized data center networking and extended enterprise controls to the cloud. Next we will bridge the in-between with software-defined-WAN and provide a true fabric from the data center to the cloud to the edge. Since we will have the foundations of connecting and securing everything, it’s time to get engaged in driving the next era of networking with VMware and our ecosystem.

We are excited about what we plan to bring to the marketplace so stay tuned, you ain’t seen nothing yet.