VMware Explore: VMware, Broadcom in 'Discovery' Phase of Upcoming Acquisition
VMware Explore is targeting the multicloud community.
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During a media and analyst Q&A, VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram said the Broadcom acquisition is progressing on track.
“We’re going through all the regulatory approvals on the one hand,” he said. “On the other hand, we’re working with the Broadcom team. I’m helping them understand the depth and breadth of our business and product portfolio, and they in turn are super excited. You saw [Broadcom CEO] Hock Tan during the keynote. So everything is … on track. And in the meantime, as we’re required to, we’re operating as a completely independent, standalone company with our own execution track and strategy. Broadcom expects the acquisition to close in their fiscal year 2023, which is November of this year to October of the following year. So we have plenty of time until the acquisition closes. We have a lot of work to do every day taking care of our customers, building and shipping great products that you heard in the keynotes.”
Raghuram said the appropriate time to talk about the acquisition is after it closes.
“What I will say is Broadcom is spending this time understanding every aspect of the business,” he said. “Obviously the channel is a huge, huge part of our business. And they’re super excited about using that channel in the ways that we are doing today and growing from there. So that’s where we are with this picture, in what we are calling the discovery portion of the integration planning, where they can understand our business.”
Raghuram said VMware Explore brings an overall message for VMware‘s partners.
“The overall message is the opportunities are bigger and broader, and more strategic for our partners to go help our joint customers,” he said. “So if you think about it, in the past, if you’re a partner that grew up with us doing … your deployments, you’re a fantastic partner. Today, you could not even be touching just the vSphere, but be doing security, or you could be doing Tanzu and you would be a great partner. So long term, if you’re an existing partner, you want to grow your business, and you can grow across all these parts of the portfolio that we have. And you don’t have to be confined just to the data center. You can be participating in all of the spending and the problems that customers are facing in the cloud for which they need help. We’ve got the products to help solve for the channel community. It’s just giant, new opportunity.”
VMware with its 35,000 partners, many at VMware Explore this week, “are a force to be reckoned with,” Raghuram said.
Sumit Dhawan, VMware’s president, said partners are critical to his company’s multicloud vision and approach.
“This whole world that Raghu talked about as multicloud is here, and he laid out the approach for customers to become cloud smart,” he said. “We know we can’t do it by ourselves. It’s the ecosystem that’s going to be critical for us to be successful. That’s why we are strategically investing in the ecosystem, both from technology partners and the innovations that we announced. And a couple of weeks ago we reformatted our entire partner program that enables partners to now be able to play the role in various aspects of their business as it’s evolving in the world of multicloud. It’s not that this partner is a channel partner or a service provider, and that partner is an OEM. There are a multitude of roles that partners are playing because that’s what customers demand in this world of multicloud. Our belief is we can’t do it ourselves, so the ecosystem is critical. We have the leading technology portfolio to help our customers to get there and a great partner program so that the partners can be profitable.”
During his keynote, Raghuram said when he talks to CEOs about transforming their businesses to be digitally smart, they say “we are not moving fast enough and roadblocks tend to be common.” Those roadblocks include: lack of skills, and not just developer skills, but cloud skills; the weight of all the enterprise apps that have to be brought forward; fragmented operations; and security.
“All of these things are slowing down the rate of innovation,” he said.
Cloud spending remains a small part of overall IT spend, “but we can fix this and change the picture,” Raghuram said.
“Many companies are starting to figure out this better approach, called Cloud Smart,” he said. “It means taking an architected and planned approach to digital transformation and cloud.”
That means deploying the right cloud for the right application, investing in a unified developer experience regardless of buildout, allowing all enterprise apps to run on a consistent architecture with security, and a frictionless experience for employees, Ragnuram said.
At VMware Explore, Nvidia announced a new data center solution with Dell Technologies designed for the era of artificial intelligence (AI). It brings AI training, AI inference, data processing, data science and zero-trust security capabilities to enterprises worldwide.
The solution combines Dell PowerEdge servers with Nvidia BlueField DPUs, Nvidia’s GPUs and Nvidia AI enterprise software. It’s optimized for the VMware vSphere 8 enterprise workload platform.
Kevin Deierling is Nvidia’s vice president of networking.
“Multicloud is super important,” he said. “People want options so that they can stand things up. And VMware is a great platform to do that. So now that we have this running on Bluefield, I think you’ll see some of the cloud providers, some of the on-premises providers and some of the colo providers come forward. We already have a number of platforms that are offering bare metal services, and now you could install VMware on to those platforms and be able to experience that in different cloud environments, as well as on premises and in colo. And so I think that will be something you’ll see here in the future.”
Veeam, a VMware ecosystem partner, is previewing its latest upcoming Veeam v12 software. It will be available in early 2023.
Michael Cade is Veeam’s senior global technologist. He said Veeam’s history is around protecting virtualized workloads.
“So when we first started, it was focused on purely protecting VMware virtual machines,” he said. “And ever since we’ve been a strong alliance partner with VMware, as much as we broaden our platform in terms of being able to look after more workloads and more data, VMware still sits kind of front and center. There’s a large, large percentage of VMware and Veeam customers together.”
In terms of VMware’s multicloud vision, Cade said Veeam shares that vision.
“We can protect virtualization, VMware vSphere, but then also public cloud offerings such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure,” he said. “So from a multicloud point of view, we still need to consider backup and recovery. We need to consider security when it comes to how do we protect our data, how do we secure that data, and then how do we also bring the portability of that data? How can we take maybe a cloud-based virtual machine and recover that on premises in vSphere or in another different location, and be flexible about how we recover that data and not really be be agnostic and give that freedom of choice … when it comes to integration points with vSphere and different storage vendors that you see here. But from a Veeam perspective, we are simply software-defined, so there is no specific hardware whether you need to run Veeam, so it’s very agnostic. It gives you freedom of choice as to what and where you run it on.”
IGEL is on hand at VMware Explore to interact with partners and customers to show them how IGEL can help their businesses perform and be more secure.
Brad Tompkins is IGEL’s chief revenue officer.
“Without our alliance partners, our operating system is near worthless,” he said. “So we’re constantly working with them to to upgrade and to make sure that everything works together. On the channel side, we’re always working with our partners to make sure we’re expanding our business as much as possible, helping our channel partners provide a more complete solution to their customers.”
IGEL‘s next-generation operating system, OS 12, should be available next spring.
“Partners can look forward to an operating system (OS) that’s more flexible than it is today,” he said. “One of the biggest changes that we’re making to that OS is we’re creating something called an application portal so that our alliance partners can actually make sure that their applications work with IGEL and they can take on that responsibility. But what comes with that is a more up-to-date system and a more flexible system. So we’re not relying on IGEL development to make all those changes. We sort of spread that out. And what we think will happen is it will turn into more of like an Apple App Store or Google App Store, where more and more alliance partners will come and put their applications in there that will work on IGEL OS. So that’s one of the game changers. The other game changer is we are going to build an easier onboarding system so that when people go to launch and connect to their digital workspaces, they just answer three questions. What language you speak, what time zone are you in and what’s your email. And then everything will actually automatically load in a secure environment. So those are some of the changes that we’re making.”
IGEL is on hand at VMware Explore to interact with partners and customers to show them how IGEL can help their businesses perform and be more secure.
Brad Tompkins is IGEL’s chief revenue officer.
“Without our alliance partners, our operating system is near worthless,” he said. “So we’re constantly working with them to to upgrade and to make sure that everything works together. On the channel side, we’re always working with our partners to make sure we’re expanding our business as much as possible, helping our channel partners provide a more complete solution to their customers.”
IGEL‘s next-generation operating system, OS 12, should be available next spring.
“Partners can look forward to an operating system (OS) that’s more flexible than it is today,” he said. “One of the biggest changes that we’re making to that OS is we’re creating something called an application portal so that our alliance partners can actually make sure that their applications work with IGEL and they can take on that responsibility. But what comes with that is a more up-to-date system and a more flexible system. So we’re not relying on IGEL development to make all those changes. We sort of spread that out. And what we think will happen is it will turn into more of like an Apple App Store or Google App Store, where more and more alliance partners will come and put their applications in there that will work on IGEL OS. So that’s one of the game changers. The other game changer is we are going to build an easier onboarding system so that when people go to launch and connect to their digital workspaces, they just answer three questions. What language you speak, what time zone are you in and what’s your email. And then everything will actually automatically load in a secure environment. So those are some of the changes that we’re making.”
During the start of this week’s VMware Explore in San Francisco, VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram provided a brief update on the company’s highly anticipated $61 billion acquisition by Broadcom.
Raghuram said VMware is in the discovery process in terms of how partners, customers and others will be impacted by the acquisition. The company announced the acquisition in May; it should close in Broadcom’s 2023 fiscal year, which starts in November.
VMware Explore was previously VMworld. The annual conference has brought more than 10,0000 attendees from around the globe.
During his opening keynote, Raghuram said VMworld was a community of data center professionals; now, the conference is broader, extending across clouds and edge. VMware Explore is targeting the multicloud community. Check out our coverage for more about VMware’s multicloud news for partners.
Raghuram said he’s been with VMware since 2003. During that time, the company has been through many transitions.
“In May, we announced our next major transition, our acquisition by Broadcom,” he said. “Many folks from Broadcom are joining us online. (Broadcom CEO) Hock Tan is joining us virtually. Since May, I’ve spent a lot of time with Hock; most of the conversations have been about this community and opening the next stage of this community.”
See our slideshow above for more about the upcoming Broadcom-VMware acquisition, and more from VMware Explore.
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