“So, here’s my view,” Tan said. “Very simple: The future of the enterprise — your enterprise — is private. Private cloud, private AI, your own private data. It’s about staying on prem and in control. Of course, you continue using public cloud for elastic demand and bursting workloads, but in this hybrid world, the private cloud is now the platform to drive your business and your innovation, and we have work to do to make that happen.”
He noted that legacy data centers are siloed, and “you are so screwed because silos don’t work well together, and it’s painful for you to deliver services to your internal customers.” Troubleshooting is also a challenge, with the inevitable finger-pointing that leads to delays in finding the root cause of an issue, he said. And deployment of new applications takes longer than it should.
Paul Turner, vice president of products, VMware Cloud Foundation division, admitted that the problem of silos existed within VMware as well as with its customers.
“We built products that were focused on each of the silos,” he said. “We needed to do better. We had to bridge our silos. We didn’t have single-sign-on authentication across our products. We didn’t have common policies. You talked about us not having unified tagging. You talked about us having independent product lifecycle, independent logging, no common alerting. We could do better, and we have.”
VMware’s solution, he said, was to make its software products work well together in a single platform known as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and the upcoming major release, VCF 9, addresses many of the complaints, adding a new operations console, centralized governance policies, a common identity system, unified license and fleet management, and more.
