Newly Independent VMware to Focus on Multi-Cloud

As an independent company once again, VMware will focus its efforts on providing management planes that span multiple cloud computing environments after officially spinning out of Dell Technologies.

Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president for the cloud-native apps business unit at VMware, said the company now has a unique opportunity to work closely with providers of cloud services, builders of on-premises IT infrastructure and providers of telecommunications services.

The terms of the spin-off included an $11.5 billion special cash dividend that resulted in a $27.40 per share dividend payment to all VMware stockholders. VMware claims the simplified financial structure that arises from the deal will provide it with additional operational and financial flexibility.

Going forward, much of the development work will focus on providing management planes that not only span multiple clouds but also address specific cross-platform requirements such as security. It’s not likely there will ever be one single uber control plane for all of IT, noted O’Farrell. Rather, IT teams should expect VMware to deliver a series of well-integrated control planes to automate specific tasks in a way that breaks down IT silos, he said.

VMware, however, under terms of its existing alliance, will also continue to work closely with Dell to create server environments that are optimized for VMware hypervisor platforms, O’Farrell said.

Key to the strategy is a portfolio of observability tools that VMware plans to continue to expand, noted O’Farrell. VMware will also address the requirements of both traditional monolithic applications running on virtual machines as well as cloud-native applications running on distributions of Kubernetes, such as VMware Tanzu, that may be deployed on top of a hypervisor or on a bare-metal server, he added.

Given the complex state of IT environments today, it’s all but inevitable something will go wrong, said O’Farrell. The challenge and the opportunity for VMware is to provide IT teams with the observability tools required to discover as many issues as possible before they adversely impact the business, he added. Once those issues are discovered, IT teams should be able to automate the remediation process using the rest of the portfolio of VMware management frameworks, he noted.

Those management frameworks will also provide the foundation for unifying traditional approaches to IT service management (ITSM) with DevOps best practices that are now being used more widely, especially to manage cloud-native applications, said O’Farrell.

When it comes to on-premises IT environments, VMware continues to dominate. Its hypervisor is, by far, the most widely used on servers in local data centers. VMware has spent much of the last two years expanding its reach into multiple clouds to enable IT organizations to standardize on a series of management frameworks. The goal is to reduce the total cost of IT by reducing reliance on what would otherwise be a hodgepodge of isolated management frameworks. The challenge VMware regularly encounters is the IT teams that manage cloud computing environments are not always the same ones that are managing on-premises IT environments. As such, many IT teams that have deployed cloud applications tend to embrace the management frameworks provided by their cloud services provider.

VMware, however, is betting that as more organizations look to reduce the total cost of IT, the economic pressure to converge IT management using its frameworks will be simply too great to ignore.