VMware this week announced it has made a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of its vRealize automation platform generally available.
Taruna Gandhi, senior director for product and technical marketing at VMware, said VMware vRealize Operation Cloud will make IT automation more accessible to a broader swath of organizations that might not be able to implement IT automation on their own.
The vRealize Operations Cloud service provides all the same capabilities as the on-premises edition of vRealize with the added benefit of being integrated with other VMware Cloud services, including VMware Cloud on AWS.
In general, Gandhi said VMware is seeing increased adoption of IT automation frameworks occurring in three phases. In the first phase, IT teams are automating internal processes primarily for their own benefit. In the second phase, IT operations teams set up self-service portals for developers. In the third phase, organizations embrace DevOps processes to provide developers with the equivalent of a cloud computing experience spanning both on-premises and public cloud computing resources.
Most existing VMware customers are still in the first or second phases, but over time Gandhi said VMware expects organizations to adopt DevOps practices as part of a more aggressive effort to reduce costs during the current economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic while accelerating the rate at which applications are deployed and updated.
The VMware vRealize Operations Cloud will play a significant role in accelerating that transition because it makes IT automation available as a service rather than a platform that needs to be deployed and maintained by an internal IT department. The beta test for vRealize Operations Cloud spanned dozens of customers that put more than 130,000 virtual machines under management across 120-plus vCenters and more than 10 VMware Cloud on AWS deployments, Gandhi said, noting the next phase will to see IT organizations begin to centralize the management of multiple cloud silos that have sprung up over the last several years within most organizations.
There are, of course, no shortage of options these days when it comes to IT automation frameworks. VMware is making a case for vRealize as a natural extension of the VMware management tools that many organizations employ to manage VMware virtual machines that are widely used across most enterprise IT environments. VMware is now extending the reach of those tools to enable IT teams to also manage containers and even rival virtual machine platforms, noted Gandhi.
Most of those IT organizations are now struggling to manage IT environments that have become more complex at a time when the pressure to employ higher levels of automation to rein in costs is rising sharply. It remains to be seen how IT organizations will respond to that imperative as pressure to either cap or reduce IT headcount continues to mount. Of course, not every sector of the economy is experiencing the same pressure. There are high-growth segments involving, for example, educational or entertainment services. Regardless of industry, however, it’s clear IT teams are being asked to do a lot more sooner with either the same or fewer resources.
