Companies around the world lived through a difficult two years with the pandemic – and for many of them things are getting worse.
“Over the last few months the macro environments that customers work in have deteriorated,” says Raghu Raghuram, CEO of VMware, keynoting the VMware Explore event in Barcelona.
“They have to look at controlling costs, and dealing with increasing cyberthreats,” he says. “But it is more than cybersecurity: it is the idea of digital resiliency and how to ensure it; and the challenges of energy use and consumption.
“Despite this, CIOs and CEOs are steadfast in their determination to become digital smart,” Raghuram says.
But, while companies are maintaining their enterprise systems, they need to keep transforming. “And this is at the heart of digital smart,” Raghuram says.
For most companies, the digital journey started with digitising the front office. “And that was a fantastic success. So CIOs everywhere decided to go cloud-first on everything and re-platform their systems.
“But over the last two to three years, CEOs are now asking why this takes so much time – and how they can go faster.”
Raghuram believes that what is getting in the way is a lack of development skills, the weight of enterprise apps, and fragmented operations and security.
Earlier this year, VMware asked customers to characterise the state of their cloud. “You termed it cloud chaos – that was the state of your cloud efforts,” Raghuram says.
“While the cloud has been a phenomenal success, it is still only 10% of enterprise spend. We have a long way to go, and we have to go faster.”
VMware now advocates a cloud smart approach, where the application determines the cloud strategy and location.
“Depending on any number of factors, we believe cloud smart is replacing cloud first as the modern approach to digital transformation.”
Customers shouldn’t be debating about whether to go with private or public cloud, he says. “It should be about what your application portfolio looks like. Which are cloud-native and which are enterprise apps. And how do we marry them together?”
VMWare has launched Cross-Cloud services, with technologies that allow customers to implement cloud smart strategies. “Companies can go from cloud chaos to cloud smart.”
Cloud-smart organisations have benefitted from their multi-cloud operations noting their enhanced competitiveness and top-line results. For example, according to research by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by VMware, 97% of cloud-smart organisations surveyed say their approach to multi-cloud has improved their revenue growth, and 96% say it has improved their profitability.
These learnings point to the impact of VMware Cross-Cloud services – which provide customers with the advantages of a cloud-smart approach by helping them chose the right cloud for the right app.
Accelerate Cloud Transformation and Extend to the Edge
VMware has announced offerings focused on helping enable customers to better run, scale and secure enterprise workloads across private and public clouds and at the edge.
With 25 partners globally, VMware Sovereign Cloud now features VMware Tanzu on sovereign cloud, VMware Aria Operations Compliance pack for sovereign clouds, and new open ecosystem solutions.
VMware’s next-generation SD-WAN solution, featuring a new SD-WAN Client, will help enterprises more securely, reliably, and optimally deliver applications, data and services to the site, branch, and home, across any network to any device.
The new VMware Carbon Black XDR will advance lateral security by extending VMware’s network visibility and detection to VMware Carbon Black Enterprise EDR.
The new VMware HCX+ and enhancements to the VMware NSX ALB PULSE Cloud Service will help enterprises embrace the cloud operating model.
Build and Operate a Cloud Native Platform
VMware announced advancements to its VMware Tanza cloud native app portfolio and VMware Aria cloud management platform. They combine to deliver a cloud-smart approach to cloud native application development, delivery, and management that supports customers at every step of their journey, across any Kubernetes and across any cloud.
Empower the Hybrid Workforce
IT teams continue to deal with challenges in today’s hybrid work environment as employees use more devices, access more applications across more clouds, and work from more locations than ever. VMware has announced new capabilities across its Anywhere Workspace platform to help further ease this management burden for IT teams and improve their productivity with automation.