Mark Davison is at VMworld 2018 Europe in Barcelona – During his keynote at VMworld, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a slew of new products and innovations geared to address what he calls “the era of technology superpowers” – cloud, mobile, artificial intelligence (AI) and the IoT edge.
Discussing how organisations continually face the business dilemma of people or profit, Gelsinger says we are entering an era where companies can do both. “There is a fundamental need to do well and to do good, particularly in the technology environment,” he says. “We have a responsibility to do both. We’re committed to doing well and to do good. It is something we need to do as a company and as an industry.
“Our job – our responsibility – is to be a force to shape technology for good,” he adds. “And today, this opportunity is greater than ever before in the era of technology superpowers: cloud, mobile, AI and edge.
“Tech innovation is vibrant across Europe, the Middle East and Africa and is leading the way to shape the future in key areas such as 5G, IoT, smart cities and data privacy, amongst others” says Gelsinger. “With digital transformation underway worldwide, customers are increasingly relying on VMware to be their essential, ubiquitous digital foundation enabling their business transformation.”
Gelsinger’s keynote included several product announcements and demos, but two beta programmes he previewed were particularly prominent:
VMware Blockchain
VMware is partnering with Dell Technologies, Deloitte and WWT to develop and support VMware Blockchain. Additionally, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions will support VMware Blockchain.
He adds that VMware Blockchain is being designed to solve challenges in three key areas:
True decentralized trust, with the ability to deploy nodes across multiple different cloud environments including on-premises managed nodes;
Robust day-two operations, supported by VMware Blockchain’s availability as a managed SaaS platform, single pane of glass management interface and enterprise monitoring and auditing tools
Developer-friendly offerings, which includes tooling for smart contract CI/CD; rich developer guides, API documentation and sample code and an open source foundation in Project Concord.
Project Dimension
Now in beta, Project Dimension will enable customers to consume infrastructure that physically resides in data centres, branch or edge sites through a cloud-managed, as-a-Service approach.
By taking the simplicity, agility and velocity of cloud-managed infrastructure-as-a-service and physically bringing it down to wherever infrastructure is required, Project Dimension will be able to power a host of edge, data centre, and hybrid cloud use cases.
Project Dimension will extend the VMware Cloud to deliver a software-defined data-centre (SDDC) in a hyperconverged appliance as-a-service, leveraging a hybrid architecture of cloud components and the full VMware SDDC stack running locally. Customers will be empowered to deploy on-premises data centre technology with maximum simplicity, agility, security, and full infrastructure interoperability that VMware is known for.