SAN FRANCISCO, USA–VMware will have to speed up the rollout of its offerings to become the go-to vendor for enterprises looking to modernise their applications, or risk having its competitors step in for a piece of the burgeoning market. The US virtualisation player has been talking up the importance of containers–with Kubernetes a critical piece–as businesses re-architect their applications, and the need for tools to help developers build, run, and manage applications for a multi-cloud environment.
At VMworld here this week, the technology vendor made a slew of announcements outlining its plans to release tools designed to transform the way businesses developed next-generation software–in particular, on Kubernetes. Amongst these was Tanzu, VMware’s new brand of products and services designed for Kubernetes, which included Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Mission Control, and future releases from its pending acquisition of Pivotal.
Speaking at the conference earlier, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said Tanzu–which was Japanese for container–underscored the company’s belief that Kubernetes played a key role in automating the deployment and management of containerised applications.
In a previous ZDNet report, Gelsinger likened the open source platform to what Java was as a software extractor for two decades over the turn of the century and expressed ambitions for VMware to be “the dial-tone provider for enterprise Kubernetes”.
Its success, however, would depend on how quickly it executed on its plans, according to Joseph Sweeney, advisor for workforce transformation at research firm IBRS. So far, VMware had yet to fully roll out most of the products it talked about this week, said Sydney-based Sweeney, who was speaking to ZDNet on the sidelines of the conference.
“I’m not convinced they’ve got everything they say will be delivered. A lot of it feels like a statement of intent, rather than an actual deployment at this point,” he said, but noted that the vendor’s plans for Tanzu were significant to its future strategy.
He explained that virtualisation as a computing model was being replaced by containers and VMware, which core base was steeped in virtualisation, would have to evolve to ensure its continued growth.
“If VMware remains or intends to remain purely on virtual machines, its future would not look good because we’re moving into a different computing model that has more agility underneath, more cloud native, and that’s containerisation,” he said. “And Kubernetes is a way you managed containers and bring them together.”
Sweeney added that VMware’s expertise on delivering management tools around virtualisation would stand it in good stead, if it was able to transition this to containers and follow through with its announcements this week.
“What they’ve presented here is very much proof-of-concept [but] I suspect they will execute very quickly on it because the hard part isn’t Kubernetes but managing things at scale and VMware knows how to do that,” he said. “So it’s a way for them to protect their core strength, offering management software to virtualise and now container environment. If they don’t, some other company [such as an open source player] will, so I think it’s a sound strategy.”
Duncan Hewett, VMware’s senior vice president and Asia-Pacific Japan general manager, though, said the vendor typically announced new capabilities to provide customers a view of future developments on its platform.
“And we’ll make stuff available today and more continue to be delivered over time,” Hewett told ZDNet on the sidelines of the VMworld conference. He added that some components of Tanzu already were available when it was announced. Its acquisition of Heptio last year also brought along an “operational” Kubernetes management platform, which made up part of the Tanzu suite, he said, adding that Tanzu Mission Control was available as a beta from this acquisition.
In addition, its pending acquisition of Pivotal encompassed tools and customers from a company that had been established for more than seven years, he said. “Some we’re announcing [this week] as a technical preview or beta code for people to work with us to provide input on where we need to finish the development or test what’s already there,” he noted.
Hewett also saw opportunities for a strong uptake of these tools in Asia-Pacific, where there was rapid application development amongst enterprises. Noting that Asia was leapfrogging other regions due to its large consumer population, strong mobile adoption, and comparatively fewer legacy systems, he said some markets such as Myanmar was modernising quickly and banks were delivering services via mobile phones.
This meant enterprises in these markets were moving straight to software-defined infrastructure from the get-go and this was fuelling the need for modern applications, he said.
Local APAC cloud partnerships, competition from Azure
With its Kubernetes gameplay then “most strategic” for VMware, Sweeney said the vendor’s priorities for Asia-Pacific should be straightforward enough.