Today at the VMworld Europe Day 1 General Session, we announced the Project Dimension Beta Program. We’re really excited to drive a deeper working relationship with our most passionate customers for Project Dimension. But before I talk more about the Beta Program, let’s take a step back and look at what’s been happening with Project Dimension since VMworld 2018 US.
A quick recap: we launched Project Dimension in Las Vegas in late August to much excitement and interest from our customers. We received an overwhelming response from customers across all industries including retail, manufacturing, telco, oil and gas, and many others. In addition to receiving tremendous inbound interest, we proactively sought out more detailed feedback via a multi-city use case and usability study.
As we spent time talking to all these customers, some common use cases quickly emerged:
Modernize Data Center, Edge, and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: the most basic use case is the modernization of legacy and siloed infrastructure. Looking at edge computing as an example, edge computing is not new – many customers have been doing it for years. Yet previous solutions left a lot to be desired. Customers are seeking dramatic simplification with capabilities such as automated lifecycle management, integrated monitoring, and much more. Project Dimension’s Infrastructure as-a-Service will be a gamechanger for so many of these customers. The same benefits would be applicable to data center use cases.
IoT and AI/ML: pretty much every customer we’ve talked to has big plans relating to IoT. They’re looking at rolling out IoT as well as companion infrastructure to support advanced analytics, AI and ML in order to process all the data coming off those IoT devices. For many of these customers, bandwidth and latency are two big factors necessitating a local processing solution “near” the IoT things generating the data. Project Dimension will offer a powerful solution that allows customers to consume that infrastructure as-a-service, enabling them to focus on their differentiated analytics and AI/ML algorithms.
Security: security repeatedly came up as a critical topic of concern for customers. They often don’t have the time or ability to properly secure their edge environments. Basic security hygiene like staying on top of patching, encryption by default, proper key rotation, etc., isn’t happening as it should. Project Dimension’s ability to solve all these – to be secure by default – is important to pretty much every customer we’ve talked to. Plus the ability to seamlessly deliver innovative new security capabilities like VMware AppDefense is another huge plus.
The conversations we’ve had with customers have given us tremendous insight into customer needs and requirements. Our engineering team has been hard at work building out capabilities of Project Dimension based on all this feedback. However, we now feel we’re ready to take it to the next level. We’d like to partner with customers to get early versions of Project Dimension into their environments to test out and give us detailed feedback.
To that end, we’re launching the Project Dimension Beta Program today. The Beta Program will include a selective set of customers whose use cases, requirements, and environments match our initial focus areas. We will work hand-in-hand with these customers to get Project Dimension up and running in their environments so that we can test it out in the “real world” and get constructive feedback.
We are looking for customers who are interested in being beta customers! If that’s you, please indicate your interest. We’ll review your submission and contact you for more information if it appears there’s a good fit.
We’re looking forward to taking Project Dimension to the next level and working closely with you all to do so!
