VMware zeroes in on multi-cloud, security capabilities at VMworld 2021

VMware unveiled its latest innovations at its annual VMworld conference, shining a spotlight on capabilities designed to ease multi-cloud deployments and boost security.

During a keynote session, VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram said “it’s clear, multi-cloud is going to be the model we’re going to use for the next 20 years,” citing internal research which showed 75% of VMware customers are relying on two or more public clouds. "Going forward, multi-cloud is the center of gravity for everything we do," he added.

Raghuram explained the company is focused on innovating across five core building blocks in the multi-cloud arena, including app platforms, cloud infrastructure, cloud management, security and networking, and edge and remote work.

A new suite of Cross-Cloud services includes its Tanzu application platform, which was previously released in beta and offers developers the ability to build and launch apps on any flavor of Kubernetes; Project Arctic, which establishes hybrid cloud as the default operating model on VMware’s vSphere platform; and Project Ensemble, a unified control plane for VMware Cloud.

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The company also unveiled a new VMware Edge product portfolio, which includes an Edge stack, secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities and a Telco Cloud Platform. Finally, VMware upgraded its SASE platform with a new cloud access security broker, which provides more visibility into and control over app access, and a data loss prevention feature to help protect against data leaks and ensure compliance with data privacy laws.

VMware said its Cross-Cloud services will work across all major public cloud environments – including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle and Alibaba – as well as private, telco, sovereign and edge clouds.

Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights and Strategy, told Fierce VMware’s focus on multi-cloud capabilities stood out to him.

“Multi-cloud right now is easier said than done as typically each cloud provider has different operations, services, networking and security. VMware's value proposition is strong in that it removes most of that complexity, for a fee, of course,” he said. Moorhead added “it's not fully baked as two of the services are ‘projects’ but as every VMware project has become a real product I think this is very much reality.”