Kathy Gibson is at VMware vForum 2022 – VMware changed the way we know IT today; and continues to lead new developments that optimise business outcomes.
That is the bold claim from Ian Jansen van Rensburg, chief technologist and SE director of VMware Sub-Saharan Africa
“When VMware told the market we could build virtualisation, we changed people’s lives in the IT industry,” he says.
“A lot of industries are in the race to become digitally smart, and to improve the user experience – because this is what determines whether the infrastructure or device is good.”
The user experience is linked to modern applications and the infrastructure running those applications.
The backbone supporting these applications in the multi-cloud, he says – indeed, 77% of IT leaders reports that modernising apps increases their company revenue.
App transformation is currently CIOs’ top priority, according to 91% of them.
Ultimate cloud initiatives are strongly multi-cloud, and 81% of companies expect to be multi-cloud by 2024.
“Multi-cloud provides significant benefits,” Jansen van Rensburg says. “It is a rich set of developer services, and developers want to use cloud because it is easy and accessible. It is immensely scalable, and has global geographical availability.
“We all know these things, and that is why cloud is so great.”
But the multi-cloud also brings new challenges. Among these is deciding which apps should be deployed to which cloud. “If you don’t know what applications are running in your environment, you won’t know this,” Jansen van Rensburg says. You need to constantly apply policies across clusters and clouds. Are we prudently optimise cost versus performance; and do we have a global view of the cost, security and performance across platforms and clouds?”
Many tools, many teams, many objects – all changing fast, which creates complexity, he points out, “These all need skills, and each cloud has different requirements.”
A typical customer journey today starts with a cloud-first approach. But they quickly find that it’s not so easy, and they descend into cloud chaos. “But you want to get to cloud smart,” Jansen van Rensburg says. “And this needs a new approach: an abstraction layer to simplify and unify the environment.”
VMware has extended its vSphere solution to simply and unify them any clouds and on-premise systems that customers are running.
VMware offers its Tanzu app platform; its Cloud Management layer to manage all cloud environments; the Cloud and Edge Infrastructure; Security and Networking; and the Anywhere Workspace for end users.
Together these tools, together with Aria, help companies to run their environments consistently across any cloud, to achieve their cloud smart goal.
“You can deploy across any cloud, move applications to any of those clouds or on-premise; and you can centrally manage any of those infrastructures,” Jansen van Rensburg explains. “And with Aria you can also manage the applications, and this is key. Additionally, Aria Graph also gives you a realtime map of applications and tools.”
As well as the tools for developing, deploying and managing cloud environments, VMware recently also announced that it has added Microsoft Azure to its public cloud community.
It also announced VMware vSphere 8, VMware vSAN 8, VMware Tanzu Applications Platform, and VMware Aria, which enabled guardrails, migration and business insights across any cloud environment.
“So, ultimately, you are able to scale innovation to run enterprise apps anywhere, manage apps and infrastructure with a consistent model, access hundreds of innovation and cloud services, and increase resiliency, cost-efficiency and flexibility,” Jansen van Rensburg concludes.