VMworld 2015: All Hail the New Hybrid Cloud

If VMworld’s “Ready for Any” theme leaves too much to the imagination, try adding a message of “I Want it All” to the storyline.

Today, IT professionals face more pressure than ever. Across industries and geographies, the need for speed, innovation and agility falls heavily on IT shoulders.

But more than 12 years in at VMware, Carl Eschenbach, president and chief operating officer, wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We had a vision to transform the datacenter forever and virtualize 100 percent of the workloads,” he said, during VMworld’s opening keynote in San Francisco on Monday. “And we have changed the lives of tens of thousands of IT professionals.”

This week, more than 23,000 attendees — the largest VMworld tally yet — gather to learn the latest about cloud, end-user computing and software-defined datacenter technology.

One Cloud for All

Whatever the role, the IT industry as a whole has been on a journey.

“The demands on you are increasing each day, but the opportunities are also groundbreaking,” Eschenbach said. “So what if we could more easily address these challenges and focus on the big groundbreaking opportunities? What if we could enable you to run, build and deliver any application, anytime, anyplace?”

VMware’s stated goal this year is to deliver exactly that — while preparing its customers and partners for any challenge and opportunity ahead.

“The best way to deliver freedom, flexibility and choice is for a one cloud, any application, any device architecture,” he said.

VMware’s one cloud strategy provides seamless integration between private, public and managed services clouds, Eschenbach said.

“This seamless integration will create a unified hybrid cloud,” he said. “The unified hybrid cloud brings tremendous value and benefit to both IT and your customers.”

With this platform, IT operates as if they’re essentially managing one cloud, using a single cloud management platform to automate the delivery of all applications both on premises and off premises, he said.

“For users in the line of business or developers, the distinction between on premises IT and off premises IT is now eliminated,” Eschenbach said.

Hybrid Applications

The next step on the journey lies in a hybrid strategy towards applications, said Bill Fathers, executive vice president and general manager, cloud services, VMware.

“This is a fundamental shift in the application deployment patterns we’re seeing as you start to embrace the public cloud,” he said. “Put practically, hybrid cloud, using a combination of public cloud represents a way to solve some of the toughest challenges today.”

Many companies already embrace this hybrid strategy to great success, especially for disaster recovery, Fathers said.

The other key use cases for the hybrid model include applications scaling and mobile application deployments.

“Latency kills revenues,” Fathers said. “No matter the application or business, milliseconds matter.”

Businesses struggling to move existing applications onto third-party public clouds find the exercise complex and expensive because of network bottlenecks, Fathers said.

“This is one of the hardest problems that we have solved,” Fathers said. “Unified cloud platform allows you to extend your entire hybrid cloud architecture into the cloud.”