VMware has done some reorganizing in its telco group since its former GM for Telco and Edge Cloud Shekar Ayyar left the company in May to create a SPAC.
Sanjay Uppal is now the GM for the group, which has been renamed as VMware’s Service Provider and Edge Business Unit. Uppal was a co-founder of the SD-WAN company VeloCloud, and he’s been with VMware since 2017 when VMware purchased VeloCloud.
Uppal said his group views its telco work as dealing with three layers:
- the “underlay” of connectivity, whether wireless or wired;
- the secure access service edge (SASE); and
- the application layer on top
He said his group is focused on the middle layer — the service edge — which he feels like “most people don’t talk about.” VMware is instrumental in adding compute at edge locations.
In a blog posting today, Uppal said, “What we are really creating is an extensible service edge platform in the cloud. Businesses can consume services on-demand, in a subscription-based model.”
As part of its SASE offering, VMware has about 150 points of presence (PoPs) deployed around the globe. Some of these PoPs are spun up in public clouds and some of them are deployed at service providers.
While SD-WAN and SASE competitors Aryaka and Cato Networks have their own global networks with PoPs, Uppal said VMware wants to serve telcos not compete against them.
“Our PoPs are located in such a way, we don’t sell the connectivity,” he said. “We use the underlying connectivity from service providers or the mid-mile that the hyperscalers provide. We don’t compete with our customers.”
Cloud security
VMware today announced a security bundle called Cloud Web Security. It’s designed to provide more consistent security so that employees can access applications with less fear of security threats and business policy violations.
As part of VMware SASE, Cloud Web Security enables IT teams to configure security policies and apply them through a centralized orchestrator.
VMware Cloud Web Security can inspect the majority of web applications that are SSL encrypted today. Content is inspected for known virus signatures and zero-day malware attacks. The solution also offers rich traffic and threat visualization with logs.
Uppal said, “The underpinning for security is all about zero-trust. The reason we think it’s unique from VMware, we have tens of millions of endpoints we manage. That gives us an endpoint presence.” He said VMware has set up a client-to-cloud-to-container security systems that is “unique to VMware.”