VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger says the virtualization company is making progress on its multi-cloud management strategy. In fact, it sounds like VMware will deliver cross-platform vRealize tools for managing vCloud Air, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and other cloud workloads by August 2016.
"We are providing customers with powerful capabilities to extend their private cloud workloads into the public cloud and to help them run, manage, secure and connect all their applications across all clouds and all devices," Gelsinger said during VMware's earnings call last night. "We are looking forward to unveiling many of these new capabilities at VMworld, which kicks off at the end of August. These new services will provide customers with unparalleled connectivity, security, and visibility across multi-cloud IT resources, regardless of whether the underlying infrastructure is VMware based."
Crossing the Chasm
During a Q&A with Wall Street analysts, Gelsinger compared the shift to Geoffrey Moore's classic book, Crossing the Chasm. Describing the journey toward cloud-centric products and services, Gelsinger said:
"We feel like now we've crossed that initial chasm and we really are seeing the tornado of adoption, which really indicates to us that the SDDC for private cloud has an awful lot of legs and we're now really starting to feel that momentum in our customer base.
But we also have to put that against the backdrop of a much bigger shift to a multi-cloud environment. And that's where the strategy has evolved in that period of time and being able to run that SDDC stack on public cloud resources, like we've announced with IBM and recently with OVH, the strength in our VSAN business, as well as taking those products and stretching them onto public clouds, like NSX and vRealize, with Amazon and Azure, these are powerful extensions of that core strategy that we laid out four years."
Gelsinger first hinted that VMware was working on cross-platform cloud management tools earlier this year.
Cloud Management Tools: Growing Competition
Although VMware's overall business is accelerating -- thanks to offerings like VSAN and NSX -- the virtualization company can't afford to rest on its laurels.
Dozens of cloud management and monitoring tools -- from the enterprise down to small businesses -- have surfaced in recent months. Many of them offer cross-platform capabilities for at least AWS and Azure, with some extending to Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud as well. Just yesterday, Autotask unveiled CSP Boss, a cloud billing management tool for MSPs that essentially counters ConnectWise CloudConsole.
It's a safe bet VMware will unveil the cross-platform cloud management offerings during VMworld 2016, a massive customer and partner conference set for August.
