VMware’s annual event, back in person, gets a name change and perspective shift
VMworld is no more; VMware has changed its long-running developer event into VMware Explore. The renamed and greatly expanded event returned to San Francisco last week after a two-year physical hiatus, gathering thousands of cloud development and operations experts in San Francisco and many more online, to go to “the center of the multi-cloud universe.”
Being wherever the cloud is — public, private, on premises and on the edge — presents increasing complexity for the millions of devs and operations staff that write those cloud apps and keep them running. VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram described the phenomenon to attendees at his Tuesday keynote as “cloud chaos.”
“The first step in the cloud journey of course, was transforming the front office experience, delivering the next generation of mobile apps. That was a fantastic success, and that led to CIOs and CEOs thinking about re-platforming everything in the enterprise. Not just the front office, the mid office, the back office, all the processes, you name it. I call this ‘The Great Replatforming.’ But when I talk to CEOs, here is what I hear back: We are not moving fast enough.”
The bottlenecks slowing down digital transformation are common across industries, Raghuram said. It starts with a lack of specific developer skills needed to achieve the required goals across cloud, platform, and site reliability engineering (SRE) disciplines.
“The second is the weight of all of the enterprise applications you need to bring forward with you,” he added.
The third: “Because all of your teams are building applications on multiple clouds in the data center, following different models, there is no consistent developer experience — that slows them down. There is a fragmented operations model — that slows them down. There is a fragmented security model — that increases risk,” he said.
Raghuram described the process of becoming “cloud smart” as starting with removing developer toil, managing a consistent enterprise infrastructure free of siloed domains that force devs to work with disparate technologies, and creating a frictionless app experience for employees, so they can use apps wherever and whenever they need them.
‘Cloud smart’ goes from concept to product
VMware first outlined its plan to tackle these issues at the virtual VMworld event last October when it unveiled its Cross-Cloud Services portfolio. It comprises five essential building blocks: a cloud-native app development platform; consistent cloud infrastructure to operate and run enterprise apps; comprehensive monitoring and management tools; end-to-end security elements; and a more consistent digital workspace experience to help workers manage and deploy apps.
“If last year was about the vision, this year I am super-pumped because we are delivering products,” self-professed “product guy” Raghuram said. To that end, VMware introduced new versions of its crown jewels: vSphere, the company’s cloud computing virtualization platform, and vSAN, its storage area network (SAN) solution. To help manage increasingly complex multi-cloud deployments, VMware also introduced Aria, which brings together its previously-announced Project Ensemble and its vRealize and CloudHealth products under one umbrella, providing better visibility for ops teams across IT and cloud environments. The company also unveiled a new version of its Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) with support for AWS’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), acknowledging EKS as the most popular enterprise Kubernetes distribution in use. What’s more, TAP also runs on RedHat OpenShift, underscoring the company’s message about delivering consistent experiences across different infrastructures.
VMware said it changed the event’s name from VMworld to VMware Explore to better reflect its diversification, away from just the virtualization and hypervisor technology that first put the company on the map and is still inarguably centerpiece technology. VMware has grown its portfolio of multi-cloud management and security products dramatically in that direction, even since the last in-person event. The company began offering a telco cloud solution in 2020 for example, and has continued to bolster it as Communication Service Providers (CSPs) increasingly undergo the same digital transformation efforts as enterprise.
What’s more, VMware said the new name reflects more outside perspective; this year brought in a lot of third-party vendors, VMware partners and others to share their perspectives on best practices and solutions to help navigate the sometimes muddy waters of multi-cloud management, in three days of hands-on labs and detailed sessions led by VMware engineers and many other industry luminaries, who shared best practices.
VMware Explore was the first in-person event for many attendees since before the pandemic. For cloud mavens who frequently made the trip it was a joyous reunion, but they acknowledged that the current environment lent a certain tentativeness to the proceedings that wasn’t there in past years. VMware says about 10,000 cloud boffins came for the event, which would put attendance at less than half of past peak attendance for the U.S. VMworld events — not bad, for what was described as a “soft launch.”
Informally, attendees told RCR Wireless News that VMware Explore’s virtual option gave an option to colleagues that otherwise would have made the trip, who were looking for a less risky way to connect and learn.
As in past years, VMware is doing another international event separate from this one: VMware Explore takes place again in Barcelona, Spain this November. That event typically draws a much smaller crowd than the San Francisco one, so it’ll be interesting to see how well-attended it is.
The elephant in the room
For many of the press and analysts gathered for the event, much of the chatter went towards exploring the elephant in the room that VMware was simply unable to discuss in any detail: how the company’s pending acquisition by Broadcom may change things. But during his keynote session Raghuram welcomed Broadcom president and CEO Hock Tan, who waved from the audience.
The $61 billion deal is expected to close during Broadcom’s fiscal 2023, and many details still need to be worked out, but Raghuram told reporters he’s confident about this “next transition” for VMware, which only moved out of Dell’s shadow last November.
Ultimately, however, the Broadcom acquisition may prove less transformative for VMware than for Broadcom itself. VMware reported $11.8 billion in revenue last year. That dwarfs the $7.07 billion revenue reported by Broadcom’s existing enterprise software group, which will be renamed VMware following the acquisition. Once it subsumes VMware, almost half of all Broadcom’s annual revenue will be in enterprise software.
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