Building on announcements made at the Las Vegas VMworld, the EMEA event heard about deeper partnership with IBM, a strong commitment for altruistic business and a broad strategy to take advantage of what CEO Pat Gelsinger termed the “technology superpowers”.
Gelsinger shared the stage with Arvind Krishna, senior vice president for hybrid cloud and director of research, IBM, where they talked about efforts to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption. This included a new IBM Services offering to help migrate and extend mission-critical VMware workloads to IBM Cloud, and new integrations to help enterprises to modernise applications with Kubernetes and containers.
The mission critical cloud capabilities were characterised as a game changer that can minimise downtime for organisations through fully validated architectures, offering four nines (99.99%) availability with minutes or seconds for recoveries, and automated failover for workloads.
The developments are part of an overall drive for application modernisation on IBM Cloud, with multi-availability zones for hybrid cloud, consistent network connectivity and security, all enhanced with IBM Watson intelligence.
There was also an announcement of a joint laboratory initiative to develop future services.
Among the various product and services announcements was the strong theme of altruism and generally employing technology as a force for good, as the technologies themselves tend to be neutral.
Gelsinger said it was not enough for a company to do well, it must also do good.
“We have a responsibility to do both,” he said, as a company and as an industry.
This commitment was illustrated by the announcement that VMware is now a carbon-neutral company, some two years ahead of schedule. He said the company has saved 540 million tonnes of CO2 in the initiative.
It was also expressed in the company’s work with organisations such as Mercy Ships and the International Committee of the Red Cross to not only support their work with technologies, but to help them better understand how to leverage technologies to be force multipliers, extending the impact of their work in addressing the issues of poverty, healthcare, education and opportunity across the developing world and beyond.
Geslinger’s key note described what he termed the “technology superpowers.” These are cloud, mobile, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT).
“Each of these is a superpower in their own right, but together have the ability to drive development exponentially,” said Gelsinger.
He said VMware would harness the power of these superpowers to drive its own vision of any device, any application and any cloud.
With the usual emphasis on security, Gelsinger continued the message of current security models being broken, with the need for less security tools and more protection. The approach of integrating more security into products and services, was furthered with VMware PKS which simplifies deploying and operating container orchestration system Kubernetes at scale. It features NSX integration to provide container networking and security policies and as it dynamically provisions and de-provisions networks.
VMware’s partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) also saw expansion, with the announcement of services coming online in Ireland and Japan in Q4 ’18, with Singapore, Mumbai, central Canada and Paris coming online in Q1 ’19, significantly expanding its global reach, said Gelsinger.
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