New innovations promise to make your life better. You find this in your private life in examples ranging from dishwashers to smartphones. Who would want to live without a smartphone today? But sometimes new technologies come at a cost. There are adoption hurdles from initial high prices to change of usage patterns.
The adoption hurdle can be especially high for innovations in data centers. But the need for innovation is bigger than ever. A digital transformation is required for many companies to stay in business. IT departments are under pressure to deliver services faster and in more agile ways. The service quality needs to be improved, and IT services better aligned with the business. All services need to be secure and cost efficient.
Traditional IT often is too complex to provide sufficient solutions. Public cloud services help to provide the required high agility. They are flexible and minimize the need for CapEx investments. But in many cases, switching to public cloud services is neither an option nor is it sufficient. Security or regulation compliance concerns, the lack of deep business integrations, vendor lock-in concerns, and complex operations often turn out to be show stoppers.
To satisfy the need for greater agility and lower cost, along with public cloud services customers are rapidly adopting several new innovative technologies like hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), network virtualization, and containers that make infrastructure simpler. With our vision of SDDC and hybrid cloud VMware has been leading the charge in many of these technology trends. Building on top of the success of vSphere we are now market leaders in hyper-converged software with VSAN (5,000 customers), network virtualization with NSX (1,700 customers), and cloud management with vRealize Suite. The rapid adoption of these technologies is the greatest testament of the tremendous value they bring to our customers.
The reality today is that having highly dynamic, agile, available, and programmable sets of compute, network, storage and security services is no longer a business advantage, but simply “table stakes” in order to remain competitive. In many cases the transformational process required to move to these more dynamic services becomes the bottleneck. In a highly competitive environment where we all need to deal with a finite amount of resources, budget and skill sets, winning will be determined by our ability to complete the journey without sacrificing innovation. Customers recognize this and are asking us for integrated solutions. They want solutions that allow them to capitalize on the benefits of new technology trends, while making it easy to build a complete hybrid cloud faster and more efficiently without the burden of un-differentiating tasks.
Simplifying how cloud admins can build and operate the hybrid cloud is going to be a big theme for us at VMworld this year and I am extremely excited about the product announcements that we are about to make. For those of you joining us in Vegas I strongly recommend checking out some of the sessions of the SDDC- Build and Operate track to learn more about these topics. If I had to point to one session in particular, I would recommend SDDC9035-S SDDC and Hyper-converged Have Arrived – Get On Board! by Chris Wolf and Raj Yavatkar. Having seen a preview of what Raj and Chris are going to talk about, I bet this will be one of the best sessions of the conference. See you there!
