VMware expands hybrid cloud offerings

VMware has used its annual VMworld conference to announce a series of new products and services.

The company announced new and expanded product offerings including VMware Tanzu, a new portfolio of products and services designed to help enterprises run Kubernetes across environments, managing all clusters from a single control point.

VMware also announced a technology preview of Project Pacific, focused on transforming the company’s vSphere into a Kubernetes-native platform.

Another highlight was the announcement of a partnership with GPU manufacturer NVIDIA to deliver accelerated GPU services for VMware Cloud over AWS.

Meanwhile, VMware used the tech conference to introduce expansions to the company’s hybrid cloud portfolio to support automation, cloud migration, disaster recovery and other capabilities.

According to the company, hybrid cloud has become the standard cloud environment in the enterprise, with nearly two-thirds of cloud buyers now seeking a cloud model that spans the data centre, cloud and edge.

“Hybrid cloud is giving every organisation the power to drive their businesses today, and the freedom to access incredible innovation for the future,” VMware COO for Products and Services Raghu Raghuram said.

“Our hybrid cloud platform is resonating strongly with customers and these innovations will further accelerate our cloud leadership, as we deliver an unparalleled level of consistent infrastructure and operations, from the data centre to the cloud to the edge.”

The announcement comes a week after VMware announced plans to acquire two companies to further expand its cloud capabilities.

VMware announced the planned US$2.7 billion ($3.9 billion) acquisition of cloud-native software development platform provider Pivotal Software. VMware and Pivotal have a long history of collaborating, including most recently on the joint launch of the VMware Pivotal Container Service.

VMware also intends to pay US$2.1 billion to acquire Carbon Black, a cloud-native endpoint protection provider with more than 5600 customers globally.

“The security industry is broken and ineffective with too many fragmented solutions and no cohesive platform architecture,” CEO Pat Gelsinger said.

“By bringing Carbon Black into the VMware family, we are now taking a huge step forward in security and delivering an enterprise-grade platform to administer and protect workloads, applications and networks.”

Image courtesy VMware.