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VMware looks to the one unified hybrid cloud

Duncan Bennet, VMware's Australian head, said businesses are not going to run on one homogenous cloud, but in a cloud that can easily access multiple clouds.
Written by Asha Barbaschow, Contributor

Speaking at vForum 2015 in Sydney on Wednesday, Duncan Bennet, VMware VP and managing director Australia and New Zealand, told the country's business leaders the future of their enterprise lies in the one, unified, hybrid cloud.

"VMware has a very simple strategy: one cloud, any application, any class," he said. "We're not naive enough to think you're going to run your businesses on one homogenous cloud, because that's just not going to be reality, but to be able to provide one cloud where you have transparent, easy access to multiple clouds like they were one, putting all of those together into one unified hybrid cloud."

"Think about the world in the future where you have all of your applications, your users, your developers, your customers, actually not knowing, and not caring whether their cloud is on- or off-prem. This is a really significant movement and VMware is leading the way."

Despite this ideal of a unified cloud approach, Bennet said VMware needs to provide the underlying infrastructure irrespective of the type of application, be it legacy or new-world, containers, open source, or cloud native.

"That same infrastructure will allow you to service those different applications off the one infrastructure," he said. "Our end user computing capabilities need to be able to provide information and content to any device -- and most devices will keep proliferating -- and who knows what the device of Back to the Future might be 30 years from now."

Bennet believes this architecture and concept is the future of the IT industry.

"It's based on a software defined vision, a software defined datacentre, where you're not virtualising just the computing, but you're virtualising the storage and network, allowing you to abstract that away to provide that capability over private cloud, managed clouds, and public clouds and do it a secure, scalable way," Bennet said.

"We get excited about infrastructure, but it's really about the applications."

Joe Baguley, VP and CTO for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at VMware, said the company has "quite literally" turned the datacentre on its head.

"Virtualisation was a disruptive, non-disruptive technology," he said. "It was disruptive to the industry, but non-disruptive to the users."

"What we did was separate applications from hardware, but, over time, applications have evolved and the architecture of those applications has evolved. So now, applications have spread themselves across the datacentre and no longer on one machine."

According to Baguley, applications are now bigger, and the industry is currently entering a world of hybrid applications.

"Traditionally, joining your private cloud to the public has been really hard, particularly from a networking perspective. It can get very complicated very quickly," Baguley said.

"When someone comes to you in the future and says, 'I want to build a hybrid application and link together some stuff that's on the hybrid cloud and the public cloud in one great big delivery mechanism', you should be able to answer yes."

Baguley said this is a challenge faced by VMware customers every day -- how to put applications and data securely, on any device.

"Any device is becoming more interesting as we get into more of the stuff that we can manage; we're actually managing things such as vending machines, as well as cars," he said.

"We're delivering applications and data to those; it's becoming a really interesting world."

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