News Releases•11 min read

VMware Empowers Customers to Build their Multi-Cloud Future

VMware’s Multi-Cloud Strategy Unlocks the Value From Any Cloud While Delivering Better Security and Simplified Operations

VMware Announces Intent to Acquire SaltStack to Bolster Cloud Automation Portfolio

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--VMworld 2020 — This week at VMworld 2020, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) announced new innovations to help customers build, run, manage, connect, and protect any app on any cloud. Today, more than 15 million enterprise workloads run on VMware in the cloud, and more than 4,300 partners offer VMware-based cloud services. This includes all major public cloud providers. With these new and updated offerings, customers and partners can unlock multi-cloud’s full potential value by providing more developer freedom while providing IT with consistent and efficient security and operations.

The company also announced its intent to acquire SaltStack, a pioneer in building intelligent, event-driven automation software. Following close, SaltStack will enable VMware to significantly broaden its software configuration management and infrastructure and network automation capabilities. Read the full blog post here.

At VMworld 2020, VMware is delivering a range of solutions and services to help customers survive and thrive in the most turbulent market in generations. VMware’s cloud, app modernization, networking, security, and digital workspace platforms form a flexible, consistent digital foundation on which to build, run, manage, connect and protect applications, anywhere. Applications are at the heart of digital transformation. They enable businesses to deliver powerful and personalized digital experiences to customers and employees. The complex and diverse needs of applications drive the need for multi-cloud strategies. VMware helps organizations at all points in their multi-cloud journey.

“VMware has reached a major milestone in its plan to unlock the power of every cloud for every business. We now support customers’ application strategies by delivering VMware-based services on every major public cloud provider and hundreds of VMware Cloud Verified partners worldwide,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, products and cloud services, VMware. “As we drive our strategy forward, we are expanding our portfolio of cloud infrastructure, operations, and security services to enable faster application migration and modernization, and better business agility and resiliency.”

Delivering a Unified Platform for a Modern, Multi-Cloud World

VMware supports organizations across all clouds and all application types. The company offers a complete cloud portfolio that delivers consistent infrastructure and operations and enables a flexible and agile developer model. At VMworld, VMware is announcing:

  • Migrating and Modernizing Apps on VMware Cloud on AWS: VMware Cloud on AWS momentum continues to grow. As of August 2020, total VMs are up 140% and the total number of hosts are up 130% year over year on VMware Cloud on AWS. More than 600 channel partners have achieved a VMware Cloud on AWS service competency, and there are 300+ certified or validated technology solutions available to VMware Cloud on AWS customers. Working with AWS, VMware’s preferred public cloud partner for vSphere-based workloads, VMware is delivering innovations that will give customers more capabilities to deploy, move, connect, and protect applications at scale. Support for VMware Tanzu centralizes operations and management of Kubernetes clusters. VMware Transit Connect provides simple, consistent networking and security across different cloud environments. VMware HCX enhancements make planning and executing zero downtime mass application migrations easier. Broadened support for VMware vRealize Cloud Management services improves IT agility and maximizes uptime and performance, while new and expanded disaster recovery capabilities help minimize business disruptions. The new i3en.metal instance delivers four times the raw storage capacity at roughly half the cost per GB of storage per host of other offerings, and improves storage efficiency for data intensive workloads with VMware vSAN compression.
  • Running VMware Applications on Microsoft Azure: the next-generation Azure VMware Solution enables customers to easily extend or migrate on-premises VMware applications to Azure. A first party Microsoft service, Azure VMware Solution integrates with the Azure console, giving customers the flexibility to use existing VMware tools and management experiences, or leverage native Azure capabilities as desired. Customers can achieve cost savings and better TCO for Windows Server and SQL Server workloads running on Azure VMware Solution by taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefits.
  • Simple, Scalable, More Secure Infrastructure as-a-Service On-Premises: VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, the data center-as-a-service offer of Dell Technologies Cloud, adds new VMware HCX workload migration capabilities, improved performance, new host types, and support for multiple clusters within a single rack. New industry certifications provide expanded support for customers in regulated industries.
  • Run Kubernetes Workloads Anywhere: VMware is announcing Tanzu support for VMware Cloud on AWS and preview support for Google Cloud VMware Engine and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. VMware and Microsoft are also working closely together to make the preview available to early adopters soon. These updates provide customers with fast and more secure ways to extend workloads to the cloud, and further bolster VMware’s ability to offer customers a ubiquitous platform for running applications on the infrastructure of their choice.
  • Simple Disaster Recovery Service with Cloud Economics: VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is a new on-demand, easy-to-use disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) that protects on-premises vSphere workloads onto VMware Cloud on AWS. It combines efficient cloud storage with SaaS-based management for IT resiliency at scale. Customers benefit from consistent VMware operations across production and DR sites, and a ‘pay when you need’ failover capacity model for DR resources.
  • Single Marketplace Featuring Thousands of Apps and Solutions: with the new consolidated VMware Marketplace, customers can discover thousands of validated third-party, open-source, and first-party solutions. These can be deployed across vSphere, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and VMware Tanzu environments. With VMware Cloud Director service integration, partners can offer tenants a modern application catalog for developers.

Unifying Multi-Cloud Management and Operations

VMware Cloud Management enables organizations to consistently deploy, operate, and govern applications, infrastructure, and platform services across any cloud environment. New cloud management innovations include the following:

  • Innovative Cloud Management Hybrid Subscription Solution: VMware vRealize Cloud Universal combines SaaS and on-premises management software into a single subscription license, enabling customers to use either method of consumption interchangeably without the need to repurchase different licenses to support each option. It includes vRealize AI Cloud and other cloud-first capabilities across operations and automation. These include federation capabilities for a consistent multi-cloud management experience across deployments and VMware Skyline integration, which enables proactive issue avoidance, troubleshooting and automated workflows in a unified management and support experience.
  • AI-driven, Cloud-Delivered Application Performance Optimization: formerly Project Magna, VMware vRealize AI Cloud is an intelligent, self-tuning cloud service for application performance optimization. It combines near real-time and historical observability with reinforcement learning to continuously adapt VMware cloud infrastructure to the changing needs of application workloads. VMware vRealize AI Cloud helps assure service-level agreements are met while enabling business agility as customers scale and migrate workloads across environments. At launch, vRealize AI Cloud supports VMware vSAN and will be extended to other VMware solutions and application optimization use cases in the future.
  • Multi-Cloud Operations for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: CloudHealth by VMware now supports Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), enabling enterprises to view all public cloud costs from a single platform. Customers can also group assets by business unit, department, cost center, and owner, for cost reporting and showback using OCI tags and CloudHealth’s Perspectives capability.
  • Multi-Cloud Security Posture Management and Compliance: CloudHealth Secure State adds real-time monitoring for Google Cloud, as well as 20 new AWS and Azure services, including managed Kubernetes and serverless configurations. Organizations can more effectively scale security and improve collaboration between teams through simplified management of cloud accounts, custom compliance frameworks, and Azure auto-remediation support.

Empowering Cloud Providers with the Complete VMware Multi-Cloud Portfolio

VMware Cloud providers and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are trusted advisors for customers that need expertise and guidance navigating their multi-cloud journey. New cloud services make it easier for these partners to deliver and customers to consume VMware’s expanding portfolio of multi-cloud services. These include:

  • VMware Cloud Partner Navigator: formerly Project Path, VMware Cloud Partner Navigator enables partners to expand business opportunities beyond their own clouds to include the growing set of VMware-based clouds and services. Customers gain greater flexibility and choice to run applications in the cloud that best meets their operational and business requirements, with one-click application and service deployment, and access to a robust marketplace. Partners can also provide customers direct access to VMware’s growing portfolio of application modernization, business continuity, and multi-cloud operations services.
  • VMware Cloud Director 10.2: adds a set of capabilities that will enable partners to expand their service offerings with enhanced network and security services, lower costs with increased storage flexibility and efficiency, and accelerate support for developers and DevOps engineering with a full development infrastructure.

Customer and Partner Commentary

S&P Global Ratings is the world’s leading provider of independent credit ratings. Rob Roday, associate director of cloud infrastructure and end user computing, S&P Global Ratings, said, “As a result of our dynamic business environment, our IT team was asked to complete a planned five-year cloud migration in just 14 months. This would address rising on-prem data center costs while improving both business resiliency and user effectiveness. With our move to VMware Cloud on AWS, we estimate savings in the range of $20 million dollars. Using HCX, we seamlessly re-platformed 150 business critical apps to VMware Cloud on AWS with no business disruption in just eight months. With VMware Site Recovery, we've cut the time and number of people required for DR testing by more than 50 percent and reduced our risk through new levels of automation.”

The Scottish Government’s Agriculture and Rural Economy Directorate is one of the largest departments in the Scottish Government . Neill Smith, head of IT Infrastructure, Agriculture and Rural Economy Directorate, Scottish Government, said, “VMware Cloud on AWS enables us to think differently about many aspects of our IT strategy, and look at how we could modernize as we migrate to the cloud. Using the people and skills we already had in place, we converted our on-prem Solaris app to VMware and Linux, re-platformed to VMware Cloud on AWS, and ran a DR test scenario in three weeks. This proved we could move to the cloud quickly and cost effectively, we could start moving away from purchasing and managing hardware. Long-term goal, we believe VMware-based hybrid cloud can bring us transformational change, enabling us to reduce human errors, further improve security, and deliver a better experience to our users through use infrastructure as code, greater automation, more intrinsic security, and access to native AWS services.”

iSelect is Australia’s leading destination for comparison and purchasing across insurance, utilities, and personal finance products. Shannon Henwood, head of technology, iSelect, said, “VMware Cloud on AWS enabled us to move to the cloud in weeks not months and address our new reality of a distributed workforce because of the global pandemic. We have deployed a multi-availability zone stretched cluster using VMware Cloud on AWS to maximize availability, uptime, and resiliency for our mission-critical workloads. VMware Cloud on AWS was instrumental in helping us move an entire physical call center with 500+ employees to a work from home, cloud-native environment practically overnight.”

Harman designs and engineers connected products and solutions for automakers, consumers, and enterprises worldwide. Ashok Madhuranath, senior manager of cloud architecture and operations at Harman, said, “As our multi-cloud cloud strategy grew, we lacked the tooling necessary to operate efficiently across both AWS and Azure. CloudHealth by VMware provides us with a centralized view of our entire multicloud environment. As the global pandemic took hold, cost became an even higher priority. With CloudHealth’s Rightsizing recommendations in combination with other features & internal automation, we estimate we are now saving upwards of $1M a year in cloud spend.”

Sky UK Limited is a British broadcaster and telecommunications company. James Cruickshank, solution architect, Sky UK, said, “The automatic tuning and detuning that vRealize AI achieves is near impossible for a human or team of humans to do and the resulting improvement in latency and increased throughput of the vSAN clusters is a good story for Sky. With vRealize AI optimization we anticipate less complaints about performance from application owners and we have made our infrastructure massively more efficient without spending any additional money on servers or disks.”

Availability

Azure VMware Solution, CloudHealth support for OCI, VMware Cloud on AWS support for VMware Tanzu, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC updates, VMware vRealize Cloud Universal, and VMware Marketplace are all available. VMware Cloud Partner Navigator is in preview. All other products and services announced herein are expected to be available in VMware’s fiscal Q3 FY21 which ends on October 30, 2020.

Additional Resources

News at VMworld 2020

Read a summary of today’s news from Chris Wolf: VMworld 2020: Innovating with the Expectation of Change

About VMware

VMware software powers the world’s complex digital infrastructure. The company’s cloud, app modernization, networking, security, and digital workspace offerings help customers deliver any application on any cloud across any device. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to being a force for good, from its breakthrough technology innovations to its global impact. For more information, please visit https://www.vmware.com/company.html.

VMware, vSphere, Tanzu, Horizon, VMworld, VMware Cloud, vRealize, CloudHealth, vRealize AI Cloud, VMware HCX, VMware vSAN, VMware Marketplace, VMware Cloud Director, VMware Cloud Partner Navigator, VMware Skyline, VMware Site Recovery, and VMware Transit Connect are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites. VMware makes no guarantee that services announced in preview will become available at a future date. The information in this press release is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding VMware's intention to acquire SaltStack, the expected benefits of the acquisition and complementary nature and strategic advantages of combined offerings and opportunities after close. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (1) the ability of the parties to satisfy closing conditions to the acquisition on a timely basis or at all; (2) economic and market conditions, regulatory requirements and other corporate considerations that could affect the timing and closing conditions to the acquisition; (3) the ability to successfully integrate acquired companies and assets into VMware; (4) the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our operations, financial condition, our customers, the business environment and the global and regional economies; (5) VMware’s customers’ ability to transition to new products, platforms, services, solutions and computing strategies in such areas as containerization, modern applications, intrinsic security and networking, cloud, digital workspaces, virtualization and the software defined data center, and the uncertainty of their acceptance of emerging technology; (6) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures, industry consolidation, entry of new competitors into the virtualization software and cloud, end user and mobile computing, and security industries, as well as new product and marketing initiatives by VMware’s competitors; (7) VMware's ability to enter into and maintain strategically effective partnerships; (8) rapid technological changes in the virtualization software and cloud, end user, security and mobile computing industries; (9) other business effects, including those related to industry, market, economic, political, regulatory and global health conditions; (10) VMware's ability to protect its proprietary technology; (11) VMware's ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (12) the continued risk of litigation and regulatory actions; (13) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (14) changes in VMware's financial condition; and (15) VMware's relationship with Dell Technologies, the potential impact of Dell's investigation of strategic alternatives with respect to its interest in VMware, and Dell's ability to control matters requiring stockholder approval. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this blog, are based on current expectations and are subject to uncertainties and changes in condition, significance, value and effect as well as other risks detailed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including VMware's most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K that we may file from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. VMware assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this announcement.

Roger T. Fortier
VMware Global Communications
+1 (408) 348-1569
rfortier@vmware.com

Emily Mullen
Archetype for VMware
+1 (212) 331-8422
emily.mullen@archetype.co

Source: VMware, Inc.