VMware has an ambitious plan for helping enterprises juggle workloads spread over multiple cloud platforms. And that plan may survive the company’s $61 billion deal to be acquired by Broadcom.
Silverlinings sat down over Zoom with Vittorio Viarengo, VMware’s VP of cross-cloud services, to discuss the company’s history and future. Multi-cloud issues, he said, somewhat echo the complexity problems which previously arose in the data center server arena.
He noted that in the pre-cloud era, enterprises standardized on server hardware from particular vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard or Sun Microsystems, and then over time, they’d bring in servers from other vendors. This led to multiple vendors’ servers in the data center, which made managing storage, networking and CPUs difficult. VMware simplified that with its virtualization software, abstracting server complexity to a more straightforward, unified set of interfaces.
Multi-cloud creates similar problems today as the heterogeneous hardware problems that VMware addressed 15 years ago, Viarengo said. Some 87% of enterprises use two or more clouds. Today’s enterprises are going in deep with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Oracle, Alibaba and other cloud platforms, with a great deal of infrastructure on-premises.
Developers launch cloud applications without getting permission from their IT departments, deploying each application on whichever cloud platform is most attractive at the moment and without a thought to consistency or centralized management. Each cloud has its own development and management environment and the IT team needs to be trained on multiple cloud platforms which creates management complexity and additional costs.
Kubernetes doesn’t solve the problem, either; that software has a dozen distributions, each with different nuances, Viarengo said.
Crossing the cloud
VMware brings its history to bear to help enterprises solve that problem, he said.
VMware calls its solution Cross-Cloud Services, unifying workloads across multiple clouds. The company provides Tanzu, an application development platform to build applications that run consistently across any cloud, including on-premises. Additionally, the company offers VMware Cloud to unify infrastructure, Aria for application management as well as solutions for end-user computing and security.
VMware differentiates from competitors by offering its portfolio of services as a unified platform, Viarengo said. Other companies provide Kubernetes management, security and other services separately while cloud providers like Amazon and Oracle provide unified services for their own platforms, he noted.
VMware says that most of its customers are in “cloud chaos:” Multiple clouds, including public and on-premises private clouds, are out of control. Only a few customers fall into the category that VMware calls “cloud smart,” with a deliberate strategy of deploying on and managing multiple clouds for specific purposes. VMware expects the cloud smart category to grow over time.
By providing cross-cloud services, VMware makes multi-cloud chaos an opportunity for enterprises.
“More sophisticated customers are looking at it as an opportunity. They can use whatever cloud fits the needs of their application,” Viarengo said.
Filling changing requirements
For the future, VMware sees opportunity to provide infrastructure to build artificial intelligence applications. "AI is going to be the killer multi-cloud application,” Viarengo said. Companies will use multiple cloud platforms to build AI applications as cloud platforms roll out different capabilities, and VMware will provide software and services to tie them all together.
“Application needs will change over time, and you will want to be able to move your application to the cloud that best fits those needs,” Viarengo said. “There’s going to be a rush to innovate, and having an abstraction layer that allows you to pick and choose whatever clouds fit the needs of that AI application will be a critical capability that we can provide.”
In the first wave of cloud migration, companies moved everything to the cloud, but now enterprises are more selective and keeping applications on-premises when that makes sense. Organizations will want to keep their Large Language Models (LLMs) on-premises because that information is proprietary and confidential.
And there are other reasons on-premises infrastructure is not going away, Viarengo said. Enterprises keep some of their infrastructure on-premises for security and compliance reasons. Many enterprises have invested in maximizing performance for their on-premises infrastructure, and they want to leverage that investment and avoid the time and expense of doing it all over again in the cloud. Today, companies are reinvesting on-premises and modernizing infrastructure.
“Companies are becoming more selective and smart about which applications will move to the cloud,” Viarengo said.
What’s the deal post-deal?
All of this strategy sounds great — but it’s unclear whether any of it will come to pass. Broadcom says it anticipates closing its deal to acquire VMware by October. But it’s possible the deal might blow up: it’s facing regulatory hurdles in Europe, the U.K. and U.S. Either way, VMware might be a different company.
I asked Viarengo about that, and he replied: “I can only talk about our strategy as it stands today.” He noted multiple public statements from “the acquiring company” about its strategy after the acquisition.
Those statements from Broadcom align with the post-acquisition strategy as Viarengo outlined it in several places, including a recent blog post where Broadcom said it will invest an additional $2 billion in multi-cloud R&D and partner and professional services.
Supporters of the merger say it will hatch a new “supercloud” based on multi-cloud technology and services. On the other hand, Gartner is cautious, urging customers to find “exit ramps.” A legal expert is skeptical that the deal will happen, citing regulatory obstacles.
Customers are concerned, and competitors — notably Nutanix — are moving in. VMware employees are concerned, too. In comments on Reddit, VMware customers are harsh.
As for the vendor's competitors, Red Hat is pursuing a similar multi-cloud strategy, recently introducing software to link Kubernetes clusters locally and across multiple clouds.
But pressure from customers, analysts, competitors and regulators won’t stop the music for Viarengo.
Literally. Viarengo is a certified music teacher and teaches kids and friends. Here he is playing with the VMware company band, and he also plays with other high-tech pros — videos here and here. Enjoy.