Hybrid cloud, hybrid IT, multicloud, edge, IoT… it seems that this year’s VMworld conference was one big game of enterprise IT buzzword bingo.
Peel back the noise, however, and bingo isn’t the game VMware and the other vendors were playing here. It’s more like chess.
VMware and AWS – friends or ‘frenemies’?
At last year’s VMworld, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud division of Amazon.com, announced VMware on AWS. Extending VMware’s on-premises gear to the cloud appeared to be a Hail Mary for the virtualization leader, while from AWS’s perspective, it seemed to be a great way to pick off VMware’s customers.
What a difference a year makes. Today, the partnership must be making both companies plenty of dosh, or AWS wouldn’t be extending its VMware deployment into regions around the world.
From VMware’s perspective, its public cloud play is all part of its ‘any cloud’ strategy – where ‘any cloud’ includes hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, native cloud, edge, and telco deployments of VMware gear.
To clear up the buzzword bingo alert here, it’s important to understand how VMware is using this confusing variety of cloud terminology. Contrary to most uses of ‘hybrid’ meaning ‘heterogeneous,’ for VMware, ‘hybrid cloud’ represents a combination of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud deployments of VMware’s infrastructure.
In other words, VMware is hoping its customers use its gear in all environments, thus getting consistent manageability as well as the vMotion live workload portability that VMware is famous for – only now, among all of the hybrid cloud environments, beyond just on-premises.
‘Multi-cloud,’ in VMware vernacular, is quite the opposite of ‘hybrid cloud.’ For VMware, ‘multi-cloud’ means a combination of public cloud environments devoid of VMware gear altogether.
Multi-cloud represents a greenfield opportunity for VMware – either to bring such deployments into the hybrid cloud fold, or alternatively, to extend VMware management capabilities to multi-cloud environments, even though those environments aren’t leveraging VMware virtualization technology.
Getting this complicated cloud story right is a bet-the-company challenge for VMware. “Multi-cloud means multiple public clouds,” explained Sanjay Poonen, COO of customer operations for VMware. “We feel we need to be increasingly relevant in a world with private cloud, on premises, and multiple public clouds.”
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/08/30/vmware-extends-strategy-from-data-center-to-cloud-to-edge/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, VMware is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. VMware covered Jason Bloomberg’s expenses at VMworld, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
