According to IDC’s McCarthy, upgrades to VMware edge products will help customers more easily manage large-scale, heterogeneous edge deployments. And VMware is looking to help customers manage whatever components they have in their edge infrastructure.
“As enterprises add edge infrastructure to existing cloud environments, they are looking for consistency. VMware is taking its successful software-defined data center concepts to create a software-defined edge. This benefits customers by leveraging similar tools and skills to manage infrastructure and applications wherever they are deployed,” McCarthy says. “Many edge offerings are tied to specific vendor ecosystems. For example, all of the major public cloud providers have edge management software, but it is limited to resources delivered by that cloud. VMware’s approach of supporting a variety of clouds and on-premises infrastructure means that it is applicable to more scenarios than the competition.”
And as AI continues to dominate technology conversations, the need to support AI at the edge increases. Enterprises are moving to a distributed data center model for real-time processing at the edge, and VMware should continue to invest in AI at the edge, according to McCarthy.
“As the AI conversation shifts from large training in the cloud to inference at the edge, VMware needs to stay on top of emerging edge AI needs from customers while continuing to build consistency between data center, cloud, and edge environments,” McCarthy says.
VMware enlisted more than 100 customers to participate in the technical preview of ECS 3.5, which is generally available now.
