VMware made significant announcements regarding partnerships and acquisitions at its annual event VMworld 2020. It also announced several new additions to its current offerings. The VMworld 2020 announcements showcase VMware’s innovations and are in line with the event’s theme, “Together, Anything is Possible.” VMware unveiled its new offerings with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud to help MSPs. The other significant announcements are –
- VMware’s intent of acquiring SaltStack.
- A Partnership deal with computer graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp.
- VMware teams up with Dell Technologies on Project Monterey.
On the first day of the event, VMware announced its intent to acquire the automation and collaboration software SaltStack. When finalized, Vmware hopes this acquisition will boost its vRealize Suite of products and take care of all on-premise and on cloud customer automation needs. “VMware is acquiring SaltStack to significantly broaden its software configuration management and infrastructure and network automation capabilities,” said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager for VMware’s Cloud Management Business Unit, in a blog post. “SaltStack will help us to complete our automation story, enabling us to extend our automation capabilities beyond infrastructure to the entire application stack. This will include the software and packages inside virtual machines and containers,” he further added.
The event also witnessed an announcement of a strategic partnership between VMware and NVIDIA to lay the digital foundation for building and managing applications that can run anywhere and support the needs of next-generation applications. This partnership will explore AI and next-generation applications to assist businesses in every industry.
The next announcement of the event was Project Monterey, a partnership between Dell and VMware that will focus on evolving architecture for data center, cloud, and edge to address the need for new applications. “If you think of the Monterey Canyon, it is now going deep,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of marketing of the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. “Monterey will be a new way to look at how we go and efficiently offload CPUs and use these new SmartNIC offload engines as a way to think about where hypervisors run, where’s… software-defined, whether it’s storage or compute, and most important probably is security.”
Other than the announcements, VMware has launched many new offerings aimed at helping businesses develop while keeping security and agility as the priority. The current challenging times require more safety and security measures. Keeping the same in view, VMware announced the VMware SASE platform that will upgrade the security posture of enterprises.
SASE will bring the network and security services near the end-users, at their location. VMware SASE Platform runs with the help of VMware SD-WAN’s 2,700+ cloud service nodes across 130 points of presence (POPs).
The critical pieces of the VMware SASE solution include:
- VMware SD-WAN: Cloud Access Service Broker (CASB), Secure Web Gateway (SWG)
- VMware NSX Stateful Layer 7 Firewall
- Zero Trust Network Access
- Edge Network Intelligence
Other than SASE, there were several other security announcements including:
- VMware Workspace Security VDI
- VMware Workspace Security Remote
- VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload
The announcements also included the general availability of Azure VMware Solution. This marks the presence of Vmware’s production footprint in all major public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. With the Azure VMware Solution, enterprises will get advantages such as cost savings of Azure Hybrid Benefit, and integration with Microsoft Office 365 and other native Azure services.
There are also several new facilities for VMware Cloud on AWS, including:
- VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery
- VMware Tanzu support
- VMware Transit Connect
- New regional compliance listings (G-Cloud, HIPAA BAA, EBA) and white papers
- Enhanced automation and operations
- Enhanced HCX capabilities
VMware is going ahead on a revolutionary journey with its new and improved offerings. “VMware has spread its wings, has embraced more of the different IT audiences and is driving business transformation for companies in new and pretty unique ways. Part of being a SaaS or subscription company is everything we do needs to be consumer-simple at scale, and with the secure ability and the reliability of what an enterprise needs,” said Carol Carpenter, chief marketing officer of VMware Inc.