Need to know what happened at VMworld US 2017? Intelligent CIO Africa has been provided with the inside track with regards to the trends, product releases, partnerships and announcements made by the global software company as it continues on its path to be a major player in cloud computing, digital transformation and software-defined everything.
VMworld is an annual global conference hosted by VMware and this year’s event was hosted in Las Vegas between 27-31 August. Widely considered the largest virtualisation-centric event in the world, it also has a sister event in Europe that will this year be hosted in Barcelona in September.
So what did the company have to show its over 20,000 visitors?
Firstly, VMware announced new releases of VMware Integrated OpenStack and VMware vRealize Network Insight, to help customers modernise their data centres and increase business and developer agility while introducing increased networking and security capabilities.
Additionally, VMware unveiled its new VMware vSAN offering, designed to accelerate the adoption of distributed IT, by reducing the cost and complexity of expanding enterprise IT features beyond the data centre.
According to VMware, a key trend it is capitalising on is that business and IT leaders are aligning on a core set of business outcomes as they experience the benefits of digital transformation. The company is therefore setting out to help customers achieve these outcomes with a portfolio spanning cloud, digital workspace, and security. Core to its strategy is to enable customers to run, manage, connect and secure any application on any cloud to any device.
The second round of announcements from the company included the unveiling of an expanded set of products and services as part of ‘VMware Cloud’ that are available through the company and its partners. New and updated offerings announced included:
• VMware Cloud on AWS is now initially available in AWS US West (Oregon) region
• New VMware Cloud Services that enable end-to-end visibility into cloud usage, costs, and networks, with consistent networking and security across public clouds and on-premise environments
• New VMware Cloud Provider services and partner offerings based on VMware Cloud Foundation
• Expanded VMware NSX support of networking and security for clouds and cloud-native apps
• New VMware Cloud Provider innovations including VMware vCloud Director 9.0
As enterprises begin to experience the benefits of their unique digital transformations, VMware is helping customers through their journey with cloud, mobile and security software and services that let them build exactly what they need, the way they need it, for today and tomorrow.
The last announcement made on 29 August was VMware’s breakthrough solution for securing applications running on virtualised or cloud environments – VMware AppDefense. This new security solution leverages the virtual infrastructure to monitor running applications against their intended state, and can detect and automate response to attacks that attempt to manipulate those applications. Additionally, integrations with third-party solutions will enable a partner ecosystem to leverage VMware AppDefense’s unique application visibility and response orchestration.
And the announcement everyone was talking about? VMware and Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, announced the initial availability of VMware Cloud on AWS. Born out of the strategic alliance announced in October 2016, VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware’s software-defined data centre (SDDC) to the AWS Cloud, allowing customers to run applications across operationally consistent VMware vSphere-based private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, with optimised access to AWS services.
VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered, sold, and supported by VMware as an on-demand, elastically-scalable cloud service that removes barriers to cloud migration and cloud portability, increases IT efficiency, and opens up new opportunities for customers to leverage a hybrid cloud environment.
On the closing day, the company wrapped up the event with a further three announcements, including innovations to VMware Workspace ONE powered by AirWatch, its unified end user experience, management and security solution for all endpoint platforms. Customers will now have the ability to use Workspace ONE as a single solution to enable unified endpoint management (UEM) and unify the end user experience across all endpoint platforms including Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, iOS, and Android.
In addition, Workspace ONE will now uniquely integrate application programming interfaces (APIs) from major endpoint platform providers, to stay in lock-step with the latest innovations in devices and applications.
The second announcement on the day included, VMware and Pivotal Software, in collaboration with Google Cloud, unveiled Pivotal Container Service (PKS), a new product that enables enterprises and service providers to deliver production-ready Kubernetes on VMware vSphere and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with constant compatibility to Google Container Engine (GKE). The new offering is expected to become available in calendar Q4 2017, and ship as a standalone product able to integrate with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and VMware’s software-defined data centre (SDDC) infrastructure.
Last, but not least, VMware and HP announced a partnership that will add VMware Workspace ONE to HP’s Device as a Service (DaaS) technology platform. Workspace ONE, an integrated platform powered by VMware AirWatch Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) technology, provides a holistic and user-centric approach to managing all endpoints in an organisation – from mobile and desktop to Internet of Things (IoT). HP DaaS offers a modern consumption model for computing in which hardware and life cycle services are combined to improve the user experience and free up IT resources to drive growth.
