VMware Unveils Cross-Cloud Services
The increasing popularity of multicloud approaches has prompted VMware, originally a pioneer in server and data center virtualization, to present itself moving forward as a multicloud solutions provider.
At VMworld, it announced Cross-Cloud Services, a new set of integrated services that enable organizations to build, run and secure applications across multicloud environments. VMware says these services will accelerate cloud journeys, save companies money on their cloud deployments and set them free to choose any cloud.
Raghuram said that VMware would focus on five “building blocks” with Cross-Cloud Services: platforms for building applications, infrastructure for running them, cloud management for monitoring application performance across different clouds, security and networking, and digital workspace solutions.
The new services will feel familiar to existing VMware customers, he said: “We’re taking the products you know and trust and expanding their capabilities for a multicloud world.” Among the new offerings is the Tanzu Application Platform, which gives application developers “an orchestrated path to production” for their code, he said. Project Arctic is “basically vSphere as a Service,” Raghuram said, referring to VMware’s flagship server virtualization software. Project Ensemble is a cloud management offering meant to give customers more control over application costs, security and performance.
“Each of these innovations will work across all the major clouds,” he said. “It’s flexible and modular, so you can pick and choose which services you want on which cloud you want.”
DISCOVER MORE: Learn about Infrastructure-as-a-Service options.
How the Cloud Helped Save Restaurants
One born-in-the-cloud VMware customer is Toast, a point-of-sale solution provider to the restaurant industry. When the pandemic struck and restaurants shuttered, Toast was forced to innovate.
“Our team said, ‘OK, we have to pivot right now. Scaling projects can wait, stability projects can wait.’ It became, ‘How do we keep our restaurants in business?’” said Ken Siskind, senior engineering program manager for Toast. “People had ideas about what kinds of features we could build to help our customers.”
One idea turned into an application, built in the cloud, that allows restaurant customers to access a restaurant’s menu on their phones by scanning a QR code, allowing patrons to order contactlessly. Now, adds Siskind, “things have opened up again and we’re back to, ‘Hey, we still have to scale, we still have to make our platform stable.’”
VMware is introducing its Cross-Cloud Services lineup as a way of helping organizations like Toast, which is based in Boston, address the challenges that come with multicloud environments. These include workloads that are far more diverse and cloud-native, and enterprise architecture that is more widely distributed, said Raghuram.
“Meanwhile, your customers and employees expect instant access to all these applications at all times, and the security better not slow them down,” he said. All this complexity forces businesses to confront potential tradeoffs between values, such as developer autonomy and consistency of code or security and workplace applications that are accessible from anywhere.
VMware is striving to help businesses have it all, Raghuram said: “We believe every organization should have freedom and control in their multicloud environments.”
Follow all of our coverage during the conference here, or follow our coverage on Twitter at @BizTechMagazine.
