A quick chat in San Francisco that EITN had with VMware’s VP and MD in Southeast Asia and Korea (SEAK), Paul Simos, tried to ascertain how the virtualisation expert goes to market with its partners/customers in the cloud services space, if it does at all.
Another way to look at it is, how does it weigh and balance between all the cloud services during its interactions with cloud users when VMware does so much work with cloud players like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and so on.
Paul was quick to point out that VMware is the Switzerland for clouds.
“So the conversation that customers have with us is around helping them understand what’s possible in terms of scalability for their organisations, as well as how to do it consistently across any cloud.”
What has happened in past few years as customers begin the first phase of their cloud journey, is they have discovered the non-cost effectiveness of operating infrastructure and applications in the cloud the same way they have done it traditionally on-premise.
Not only that, these organisations also find themselves with applications sitting in multiple clouds, and thus in separate silos.
“So the conversation that customers have with us is around helping them understand what’s possible in terms of scalability for their organisations, as well as how to do it consistently across any cloud.”
This is reflected in the three cloud phases that VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram talked about during his keynote at the organisation’s flagship conference – there are three phases that organisations find themselves having to undergo as they first embark on a cloud journey – cloud first, cloud chaos, cloud smart.
Cloud smart?
Currently, organisations find they are not saving money as they believed they would before they bought into the idea of using cloud.
Experience with the first two phase – cloud first, and cloud chaos – currently have customers realising they need to be smarter about cloud.
A majority of them liken it to having fallen into an unwanted trap.
Paul explained, “The cloud economics model is the ability to scale up or down, shut down during quiet periods, or turn things up, or re-provision resources – an d have all of this done in an automated way.”
This is what organisations want to be able to take advantage of, but they do not necessarily take the required steps to achieve it. “Customers that go cloud-first do not take the time to do that transformation.”
This transformation involves re-architecting existing apps that tend to be legacy, so that they become cloud-aware and can take advantage of the cloud environment.
There is also a sustainability element that organisations have to address, but tend not to.
Paul explained, “If customers start creating siloed instances for a specific part of their business, for example a digital bank business within a larger traditional bank, then they potentially create an ongoing talent challenge because it of the different teams the situation calls for.
“You won’t get the efficiency and simplicity of consistent operations.”
CloudHealth and visibility into cost management
VMware proposes to be able to help organisations make educated choices about the optimal configuration for their workload.
This transformation involves re-architecting existing apps that tend to be legacy, so that they become cloud-aware and can take advantage of the cloud environment.
“Have we changed processes in our toolset to allow us to take advantage of cloud capabilities? Do we need to review and do things differently?
“We can help you answer these questions from an observability management automation perspective,” Paul said, concluding that being Cloud Smart is the journey that customers end up being on.
He believed that some of the fundamental pieces of the Cloud Smart idea is delivered by VMware with its CloudHealth tool that is integrated with the VMware Aria platform that provides consistency of operation, cost visibility, and cost management across all clouds.
