VMware has introduced new and expanded cloud offerings to help customers meet the unique needs of traditional and modern applications.
Separately, VMware and Pivotal Software, a cloud-native platform provider, also recently announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement under which VMware will acquire Pivotal, in a transaction representing an enterprise value of $2.7 billion. According to VMware, Pivotal offers a powerful set of assets including a developer-centric platform, tools, and services that accelerate modern app development. Additionally, Pivotal is a major contributor to the Spring developer framework, which sees more than 75 million downloads per month. The company is fully embracing Kubernetes with the recent launch of Pivotal Spring Runtime for Kubernetes and the upcoming Pivotal Application Service for Kubernetes. Following the close of the transaction, VMware will be positioned to deliver a comprehensive enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based portfolio for modern applications.
In other acquisition news, VMware and Carbon Black have entered into a definitive agreement by which VMware will acquire Carbon Black in a transaction, representing an enterprise value of $2.1 billion. Carbon Black's cloud-native security platform leverages big data and behavioral analytics to provide comprehensive endpoint protection against even the most advanced cyberattacks. The combination of Carbon Black’s solutions with VMware’s security offerings, including AppDefense, Workspace ONE, NSX and SecureState, will create a modern security cloud platform for any application, running on any cloud, on any device. This combined offering will provide customers advanced threat detection and in-depth application behavior insight to stop sophisticated attacks and accelerate responses. Following the close of the transaction, VMware will be positioned to provide a highly differentiated, intrinsic security cloud that will better protect enterprise workloads and clients through big data, behavioral analytics and AI.
The distribution and enterprise reach of VMware and Dell will further accelerate the adoption of Carbon Black in the enterprise, both through direct selling and through partners, including leading managed security players, channel partners and system integrators.
VMware's new and expanded cloud offerings are intended to address the rise of hybrid cloud scenarios. According to VMware, nearly two-thirds of cloud buyers are seeking a cloud model that spans the data center, cloud, and edge, and increasingly, IT organizations are turning to hybrid cloud to deliver the optimal environment for all their applications.
“Hybrid cloud is giving every organization the power to drive their businesses today, and the freedom to access incredible innovation for the future,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, products and services, VMware. “No other vendor spans the hybrid cloud as broadly or as comprehensively as VMware. 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 center to the cloud to the edge.”
New advancements in VMware Hybrid Cloud Operations include:
- Self-Driving Operations:As customers deploy applications across hybrid clouds, critical operational tasks such as capacity planning, performance management, troubleshooting, and enabling compliance to become challenging. VMware vRealize Operations 8.0 is optimized for the new world of hybrid cloud operations. It will deliver new and enhanced capabilities for self-driving hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) operations as well as multi-cloud monitoring. The latest release will deliver intent-driven continuous performance optimization, more efficient capacity management, intelligent remediation, and integrated compliance and configuration. VMware vRealize Operations Cloud, a SaaS offering, is now in Tech Preview.
- Hybrid Cloud Automation: VMware vRealize Automation 8.0 will enable IT and DevOps to automate the self-service deployment and day 2 operations of complex applications, VMs, and containers on any cloud. The solution will enhance operational agility and developer productivity through a series of new capabilities that will improve ease of use, user experience and multi-cloud readiness, with broad extensibility across VMware Cloud on AWS and all major public clouds, and enhanced ServiceNow, Terraform, and Git integrations. The solution will be built upon a container-based microservices architecture, that VMware says, is easier and simpler to install, with improved performance and high availability. These services will also be available as part of VMware vRealize Automation Cloud, previously known as Cloud Automation Services.
- Complete Cloud Management Platform:VMware vRealize Suite 2019 software will integrate vRealize Automation 8.0 and vRealize Operations 8.0 to deliver advanced closed loop optimization capabilities that enable continuous performance optimization, simplify IT operations, and lower IT costs. The addition of VMware vCloud Suite 2019 Platinum in vRealize Suite 2019 will enable IT Operations teams to gain visibility into application context and behavior to accurately identify and eliminate legitimate threats in real time, while continuously hardening and protecting workloads.
- Hybrid Cloud Cost and Compliance: CloudHealth is a leading multi-cloud management platform for managing cloud costs, enabling governance and enforcing business policy. CloudHealth manages more than $8 billion dollars of public cloud spend at more than 5,000 customers. CloudHealth Hybrid is a new service that will extend the same cost optimization, migration assessment governance, and security functionality that CloudHealth delivers to public cloud environments, to VMware hybrid cloud environments, helping customers to eliminate wasted cloud spend and provide users with reports on actual cloud spend (showback) through visibility into all cloud costs with cost/usage/performance data. With the ability to create policies for proper hybrid cloud resource usage, and trigger notifications when policies are violated, customers will gain flexibility with guardrails to better prevent unauthorized services and security vulnerabilities.
- Enterprise Observability: Wavefront by VMware delivers integrated, full-stack enterprise observability from application to infrastructure across any cloud, empowering DevOps, Kubernetes and container operations, and development teams to troubleshoot application workloads and get to root cause faster. With a new enterprise-wide dashboard UX, Wavefront simplifies troubleshooting and reduces incident remediation times through automation triggered by fine-grained alerts. Kubernetes monitoring is enhanced with automatic service discovery for Kubernetes environments, including the discovery of application and infrastructure components allowing the setup of default dashboards. Wavefront is also strengthening applications observability with the addition of trace logs to distributed tracing offering. This provides instant insights into the health and performance of Kubernetes, containerized applications, and microservices at scale.
- VMware Cloud Marketplace, powered by Bitnami:VMware Cloud Marketplace enables customers to discover and deploy validated, third-party solutions for VMware platforms, across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The marketplace is now available for VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud Provider Partners. From the entire catalog—which also includes hundreds of open-source solutions packaged by Bitnami—customers can browse, filter and select the specialized tools that are right for them. For vendors, it offers a way to easily publish solutions for VMware customers globally, and for multiple VMware platforms.
- Cloud Migration:VMware HCX is an application mobility platform that enables cloud mobility and migration for a variety of on-prem to on-prem, on-prem to cloud, or cloud to on-prem scenarios. Cloud Migration Services, built on VMware HCX, simplifies the complex tasks associated with identifying, planning and migrating workloads to any hybrid cloud. A new Cloud Migration experience is available on VMware Cloud on AWS through the Cloud Console and, over time, other workflows are planned to be available on VMware Cloud on AWS as well as other platforms such as VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.
- Disaster Recovery as-a-Service and Data Protection:VMware is partnering with Dell EMC across multiple areas to bring customers greater choice in Disaster Recovery as-a-Service and Data Protection solutions. Initially the companies will collaborate on a new DRaaS solution using AWS S3 for VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware and Dell EMC will also collaborate to enable Dell EMC to offer best in class data protection solutions for VMware workloads running at the edge, core and cloud.
- Proactive Support:VMware Skyline, developed by VMware Global Services, is a proactive support technology available to customers with an active Production Support or Premier Services contract. Skyline automatically and more securely collects, aggregates, and analyzes customer-specific product usage data to proactively identify potential issues and improve time-to-resolution. Skyline has added new proactive support enhancements including automated software compatibility checks, automated log bundle upload for Horizon 7.10 and above via Log Assist, and integration with Dell EMC Support Assist, enabling a proactive support experience for customers running VMware and Dell. VMware Skyline is included with customer’s Production and Premier Support subscriptions. Premier Support customers will have access to advanced reporting features and remediation support from dedicated support representatives.
For more information about VMware's product suite and acquistions, go to www.vmware.com.
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