VMware this week updated its Cloud Foundation platform and rolled up recent updates to the company’s virtualization portfolio all at once.

Version 5.0 of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) encompasses the latest versions of VMware vSphere 8.0u1 for workload management, VMware vSAN 8.0u1 for scale-out storage, VMware NSX 4.1 for networking and VMware vRealize LifeCycle Manager 8.10 (Aria) for cloud management.

In addition, VMware has added a single sign-on (SSO) capability, dubbed Isolated SSO Workload Domains, that enables administrators to configure new workload domains using SSO instances from different providers or platforms via NSX.

Rick Walsworth, director of product marketing for the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware, said that as the management of IT continues to evolve in VMware environments, more organizations are opting to update their entire VMware software stack simultaneously rather than attempting to update components individually.

The primary reason for that shift is that the company ensures that all the latest VCF component releases have been thoroughly stress-tested from an integration perspective, he noted.

During uncertain economic times, VMware is seeing an increased focus on simplifying IT environments as IT teams are asked to do more with less, said Walsworth. As such, more organizations are looking to standardize on a stack of infrastructure software that can be managed more consistently, he added.

More organizations are also looking to reduce the total cost of IT by employing the same stack of infrastructure software across hybrid cloud computing environments where workloads are deployed both in on-premises IT environments and public cloud, said Walsworth.

The company is also seeing increased adoption of DevOps best practices to programmatically manage IT environments that need to respond to rapidly changing requirements, he noted. IT teams are looking to work more collaboratively rather than relying solely on specialists to manage specific functions, said Walsworth.

Some of that shift is also being driven by Tanzu, a distribution of Kubernetes that the company makes available as part of VCF, he noted. Most application developers don’t have a preference for a specific Kubernetes distribution, so many organizations view Tanzu as an opportunity to extend their existing management framework to a de facto standard for building the next generation of cloud-native applications, said Walsworth.

VMware is in the midst of being acquired by Broadcom. Nevertheless, VMware this week reported revenues for the first quarter 2023 of $3.28 billion, a 6% year-over-year increase. Subscription and software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenue for the first quarter was $1.22 billion, an increase of 35% year-over-year. That increase in revenue suggests any concerns about the future direction of the company are not impacting the willingness of IT organizations to continue to rely on VMware.

It may be a while before all the dust settles around Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. In the meantime, however, it’s clear that the way IT is managed in the cloud era is continuing to rapidly evolve regardless of who owns VMware.