Hybrid cloud, hybrid IT, multicloud, edge, IoT… it seems that this year’s VMworld conference was one big game of enterprise IT buzzword bingo.
Peel back the noise, however, and bingo isn’t the game VMware and the other vendors were playing here. It’s more like chess.
VMware and AWS – friends or ‘frenemies’?
At last year’s VMworld, VMware and
What a difference a year makes. Today, the partnership must be making both companies plenty of dosh, or AWS wouldn’t be extending its VMware deployment into regions around the world.
From VMware’s perspective, its public cloud play is all part of its ‘any cloud’ strategy – where ‘any cloud’ includes hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, native cloud, edge, and telco deployments of VMware gear.
To clear up the buzzword bingo alert here, it’s important to understand how VMware is using this confusing variety of cloud terminology. Contrary to most uses of ‘hybrid’ meaning ‘heterogeneous,’ for VMware, ‘hybrid cloud’ represents a combination of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud deployments of VMware’s infrastructure.
In other words, VMware is hoping its customers use its gear in all environments, thus getting consistent manageability as well as the vMotion live workload portability that VMware is famous for – only now, among all of the hybrid cloud environments, beyond just on-premises.
‘Multi-cloud,’ in VMware vernacular, is quite the opposite of ‘hybrid cloud.’ For VMware, ‘multi-cloud’ means a combination of public cloud environments devoid of VMware gear altogether.
Multi-cloud represents a greenfield opportunity for VMware – either to bring such deployments into the hybrid cloud fold, or alternatively, to extend VMware management capabilities to multi-cloud environments, even though those environments aren’t leveraging VMware virtualization technology.
Getting this complicated cloud story right is a bet-the-company challenge for VMware. “Multi-cloud means multiple public clouds,” explained Sanjay Poonen, COO of customer operations for VMware. “We feel we need to be increasingly relevant in a world with private cloud, on premises, and multiple public clouds.”
VMware on cloud and cloud on VMware?
Given the context of hybrid vs. multi-cloud, the announcement that VMware will be running AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) on its on-premises deployments makes sense.
RDS enables customers to manage their databases as though they were in Amazon’s cloud – even though they are on-premises. As a result, customers get a more consistent experience across on-premises and cloud, and AWS will benefit from the increased ease of migration of databases from on-premises to cloud that RDS can provide.
From VMware’s perspective, bringing RDS on-premises helps the company round out its hybrid cloud strategy. If customers leverage RDS on-premises on top of VMware, then even if they migrate their databases to the cloud, they are more likely to use VMware on AWS, rather than migrating off of VMware entirely.
Life on the Edge
The ‘edge’ is another one of those buzzwords with an annoyingly vague definition. Edge of what, exactly?
The edge essentially consists of all the points where people interact with the technology of an organization. Traditionally, therefore, the edge consisted of employees’ computers and corporate web sites, but now also includes all manner of smartphones and other devices, as well as IoT sensors and actuators and the like.
However, there’s even more to the edge than user touchpoints. In some contexts, the people that interact with those touchpoints are considered to be part of the edge. In others, server equipment at remote locations is on the edge as well.
Take any retail location, for example, your local fast food joint. It’s likely to have a phone closet that contains some network and server equipment, or perhaps the gear is on a shelf in the manager’s office.
The growing complexity of the edge is a challenge that extends beyond VMware to the greater
SD-WAN offerings help such companies manage and secure such gear, and VMware’s VeloCloud offering is in the mix. The news at VMworld, however, centered on Project Dimension, an offering that is still in ‘preview’ (unreleased) mode.
To understand the context for Dimension, it’s important to differentiate between the device edge – where users interface with technology – and the compute edge, where companies have a reason to put back-office gear like hyperconverged servers in edge locations. The goal of Dimension, therefore, is to bring data center-class compute capabilities to the edge in a cloud operative manner.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger tried to clear up the buzzwords. “Project Dimension brings ‘as-a-Service’ benefits on-premises, bringing them from the cloud to on-premises and to the edge.”
In other words, VMware is working to extend its notion of VMware-supported hybrid cloud to the compute edge, regardless of where the gear is physically located.
VMware’s plan for Project Dimension is to combine VMware Cloud Foundation via a hyperconverged form factor with the VMware Cloud managed service to deliver software-defined data center infrastructure as an end-to-end service.
The Future is IoT
Where, then, will VMware go from here? The answer is the IoT. “We have a lot of edge and IoT-washing – technologies from 40 to 50 years ago are now new and sexy because they're IoT,” Gelsinger explained. “Bringing world-class IT to the world of IoT – that's what VMware is trying to do.”
Gelsinger also pointed out the disruptive promise of 5G, now only a year or two away. While the IoT has been rather slow off the mark so far, 5G promises to transform the entire IoT landscape, and with it, the notion of the edge. VMware wants to be there, leading the charge.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, VMware is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. VMware covered Jason Bloomberg’s expenses at VMworld, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
