VMware Cross-Cloud Strategy

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All right, you're listening to a podcast, actually, I'm pretty excited to deliver. I have a fellow RVer, Vittorio Villarengo, who treated me to a espresso in his RV. It is... I don't know if there's much of that going on, Vittorio. How's it going? It's going great. I'm planning my next RV trip, so I'm going to New Mexico for Christmas vacation, so I'm excited about that. Oh, that is so nice. We're thinking about RVing, wintering somewhere, and we'll figure that out, me and my wife.

But Vittorio, the reason why I have you on is that post... I think the conversation started post VMworld on LinkedIn, where I kind of questioned VMware's cross-cloud strategy. I'm like, much of the cross-cloud strategy, which you're responsible for the messaging coming out of VMworld and moving forward, is... My perception is vSphere, vSphere, vSphere, vSphere everywhere. Matter of fact, the CTO advisor did a pretty good report about vSphere across multiple clouds and the learning curve for enterprises coming across that. Before I give you a chance to position the strategic vision of cross-cloud services within VMware, I want to paint to you kind of the picture of where this perception of mine came from.

One, I was at VMware for six months, and we fought... When I was at VMware, I can say we, we fought against this perception. And then, as a customer, and VMware introduced the concept of NSX-T, which is the network virtualization platform VMware acquired via Nisera and the brilliant Martin Casado, the idea was to basically take VMware code, put it on instances of EC2, and control network security and network policy at the VM level within EC2. Again, just leaning into VMware's VM history, but that really didn't serve me from...

If I was consuming SageMaker or RDS or a non-EC2-based solution, you're here to kind of change my mind. Where is VMware in this cross-cloud journey? So, if you think about the last five years of VMware, Raghu Raghuran, who's our new CEO, used to run our products and has been the technical soul of the company for the last 20 years. But in the last five years, he saw that the world was going cloud. And so, he started to lay out, working with Pat, a set of acquisitions that, if you look at them, they're all native cloud companies, like Tanzu, CloudHealth, and so on.

And so, for the last four or five years, we have started to invest to lay the foundation to add value in the native cloud, where we don't need... Let me make this very clear. We don't need our hypervisor necessarily there to add value. And so, that all culminated in a VMworld. In the VMworld, we wanted to give a strong message that the future of the company is in the native multi-cloud. And that's where we launched the cross-cloud services, which is a portfolio of cloud-native services to build, manage, connect, and secure native applications across any cloud.

So, look, nobody will ever forget that we are a virtualization company, and we are very proud of our heritage. But the future of the company, we believe the multi-cloud is the architecture for the next foreseeable future, and we want to take our DNA, which we believe is about making things that were not designed to work together, work together, and put it to work in a native cloud. So, I love what you just said. I just got off a podcast, actually a live stream with Tim Crawford, who's over at Avoya.

He's a CIO advisor. I'm the CTO advisor. He's a CIO advisor. We think it's kind of peanut butter and jelly when we do content together. And one of the things that we agree with is that at some point, the public cloud providers have to have interoperability. We clearly see where the world is going, but there's not a whole lot of financial incentive for AWS, for instance, to play nice with Google Cloud or Oracle Cloud, et cetera. VMware has done a really great job with vSphere across public clouds.

That's why we can traditionally think about vSphere across public clouds. But if I'm an enterprise CTO or CIO, I think about my data assets and my ability to control access control to those data access assets across public clouds. So, if I have AI ML in Google, which is Google's bread and butter, and I'm consuming an NFS service out of Azure, I want to be able to apply controls across that. Those two providers are not giving me that capability directly. How do you envision VMware helping with those types of problems where you're not controlling the underlying, when you're saying, you know what, we're not going to do that with vSphere?

We can do that with vSphere, but we're not going to do that. We're not going to just do that with vSphere. We can do that with that type of thing. With what? Yes. Think about, I'll give you a very tangible example. Cloud health. So, cloud health, not only does it allow you to look at your cost and consumption across any cloud and allow you to bring it under control, but it also allows you to posture management. So, we're going, using the cloud native APIs, we look at how your various cloud infrastructure is configured and make sure that they're configured for security.

So, that's a perfect example where you need something that, a product that looks at the seams between the clouds and allows you to give you a single point of access. The other one is Tanzu Mission Control, right? Tanzu Mission Control, you're using Kubernetes, different distribution, by the way, of Kubernetes across the multiple clouds, Tanzu Mission Control gives you a single place where you can set your policies on how you want these clusters to be configured, and that's in one single place. So, I don't know if you, you probably have interviewed Jerry Chang from Greylock in the past.

He's a senior at VMware. He's from Greylock and he wrote this, he has this very great, I actually had him and Steve Harrod and Bogumo think about heritage of VMware here for lunch, and I was asking them, where do you invest? And Jerry built this whole interactive website that looks at, he calls it a castle in the cloud. And in a world where you have this big three castles, like Microsoft, Google, and AWS, where are you going to invest? What are startups going to do?

And he has a whole plethora of this huge framework that identifies the seams between the clouds and where you can add value, and of course, there is tons of areas. And I think when I look at the VMware portfolio in native cloud, we are one of the few companies that actually have multiple of these components. We have Tanzu for application development. We have VRealize and part of VRealize and CloudHealth for management. Now we have networking and security, and then user computing, which by nature is very cross cloud because it allows you to get in and out of the cloud.

So we believe we have a very strong portfolio to help our customers make sense of this multi-cloud world we live in. Yeah, I love the example of CloudHealth because this is something that I actually see in the field is this posture across public clouds. And I'll use S3 object storage as an example. It is very frustrating from a customer perspective to have to police posture for object storage across multiple clouds. I understand, and this is my argument for customers focusing on a single cloud first and then adopting multiple clouds.

I think the toothpaste is out of the tube, the cat is out of the bag. We're at the point that multi-cloud is just a reality and we have to deal with all of it. But from a practical on the ground perspective, how do I ensure that a team has implemented the security posture for object storage correctly across multiple clouds? How do I give that to a security analyst and make sure that they can do that across multiple clouds without going to deep training for knowing multiple clouds?

This is the level of abstraction that's needed in the large enterprise so that we can ensure that policy is evenly applied across cloud. Yeah. And our tool to create that abstraction used to be the hypervisor, but we put the hypervisor there and stuff that looks different than as all different type of management console and so on and so forth. All of a sudden it looks like the same. In the cloud, we understand we cannot do that. And that's why we are looking at, I think that the way you create an abstraction level layer in the cloud is through APIs.

You look at the APIs and then you, of course, they're different across multiple clouds. I don't think that I'm going to be able to like get together and figure it out. Because it's how they differentiate. And by that creates an opportunity to companies like VMware and hundreds of other startups to make sense of it and give customers ways to unify management, application development. Look at, there are companies that are worth a hundred billion dollars that were built like that. Like Snowflake, AshiCorp, Atlassian, right?

And so I think that the door is open for lots of innovation to be built around and across the big castle in the cloud. Yeah. Again, another example. So we go back to my early example and we can end on this one, which is the NSXT, the security product across that was originally applied to EC2 as the beta. I don't think the solution ever came out was kind of a preview, a tech preview of what VMware, how VMware envisioned it. I think if VMware, as you're describing it today, were to do a tech preview or a capability of how you envision it, I would infer that the vision would probably be, you know what?

Let's do this via API. Instead of enterprise, instead of approaching it from a VM perspective, let's approach this from an API perspective. Enterprise security experts understand policy and they know what policy they want to implement. They don't know the details of how to implement that policy across three different clouds. We need a VMware cross cloud NSX type solution that understands the innards of everything abstracts via API. I can send an API request to the VMware security service and it applies that app, it applies that rule via API across all three of my clouds.

That's my nirvana, like that's what I would like to see as a customer. Are you hearing that from your customers? We're hearing that. So when Raghu and Sumit, our president, took over the company in, what was it, June, I think, they went and met with like hundreds, I think there are up to like 500 customers, that's an insane amount of conversations. And they heard loud and clear that the world is multi-cloud and they're going there. And they need help dealing with that.

And so as a result, Raghu came back and wrote a very comprehensive strategic document to set the priorities of the company under his leadership. And the number one area of focus is that every new product or every existing product, every new release of an existing product needs to prioritize adding value to native applications in the native cloud. And so what that tells you is that if we had to do another full product, whatever, whether it's NSX or anything like that, the engineers are being asked to prioritize it to think about the architecture and the features and how you're going to add value to the native public cloud.

Vittorio, this has been extremely informative. I've learned things that I did not know. I love the insider view of understanding Raghu's approach in VMware engineers marching orders. I think this is super helpful. As people want to follow the VMware cross-cloud journey, how do they do that? I think if you just Google multi-cloud on Google, you find our homepage for cross-cloud, which is exciting. So here's what I'll tell you. In the next few, like couple of months, we're going to issue a couple of cornerstone whitepaper that will put a little more clarity around what is the multi-cloud problem independent of VMware.

So we're working potentially with other partners to define the problems. What are the problems? And by the way, multi-cloud is awesome. The reason why we have multi-cloud is that it allowed us to go faster, allowed us to innovate, allowed us to deal with the pandemic. But now that we are ended up with all these different clouds, we started to see the problems. So I don't want to talk about multi-cloud as a multi-cloud is there for a reason because it allows us to go fast.

But now we need to, we're seeing the problems and we need to fix them. So we're going to have a cornerstone whitepaper that describes the problem. And then Keith Colbert, our CTO, new CTO, because he's been with us for 20 years. So he's going to write a more technical whitepaper about our vision for this, which takes the internal whitepaper from Ragu, which is confidential, and turn it into. So I love to reconnect with you and your audience when those whitepapers are out.

So there is a little more meat to the bone. com, that's where you can find more information or follow me on LinkedIn. I'm a pretty prolific content producer, as you know. So yeah, this is actually how we got into this conversation was via a LinkedIn conversation. You responded to a LinkedIn post and we scheduled this conversation to go deeper. com forward slash podcast to go specifically to the podcast. And then we have other content, including the blog. If you want to interact with me directly, my DMs are open.

If you feel like, you know, I don't criticize VMware enough, I've not been accused of. Well, honestly, Nutanix has accused me of not criticizing VMware enough. Surprise, surprise. But you don't think I've criticized VMware enough. You can DM me at CTO Advisor on Twitter. DMs are open. We'll talk to you next CTO Advisor podcast. Thanks a lot, Vittorio. Thank you. It was a pleasure.