Cloud Players in Full Working Order
The cloud keeps evolving. Cloud providers have enriched their ranges and now offer a wide palette of managed services. Meanwhile, customers are becoming more mature. Most of them have chosen a hybrid cloud solution and are looking into multi-cloud solutions. A new direction is being taken with the growing number of applications reinforcing the role of the cloud. These major trends are reflected in the strategic evolutions of VMware and materializing as partnerships and acquisitions.
The collaboration between VMware and hyperscalers is centered on the hybrid cloud. With annual growth exceeding 20% over the next five years, hybrid cloud is imposing itself on the IT landscape. Ninety-two percent of VMware Enterprise customers have a hybrid strategy and are poised to migrate six million application workloads to the cloud over the next few years. Major public cloud vendors, known as "hyperscalers" due to their size, have taken note of this trend and honed their strategies accordingly. All have invested in VMware technologies to install private cloud solutions in their customers' data centers and facilitate the migration of application workloads to and from the cloud.
Amazon Web Service (AWS) offers "VMware Cloud on AWS". Microsoft offers "Azure VMware Solution". Google Cloud features "Google Cloud VMware Engine". Oracle has announced "Oracle Cloud VMware Solution" and IBM has extended its partnership with its "IBM Cloud for VMware Solution". Let's also recall that OVH offers a "Hosted Private Cloud" solution based on VMware's Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) platform. This simplifies the hybrid cloud and enables the management of the entire set of clouds with homogenous security. To industrialize the hybrid cloud and further simplify the multi-cloud, improvements have been made to the VMware Cloud Provider Platform, and in particular to vCloud Director, with the addition of multitenant support.
The cloud will need to prepare for the 500 million applications that are forecast to arrive between now and 2023 (IDC). In 2017 VMware embarked on a mission-critical path by taking into account containers and the key role of the Kubernetes orchestration platform.
The newest versions of vSphere and vCloud Director manage containers as efficiently as virtual machines, making them equal citizens. In 2019 VMware acquired Pivotal and with it the capacity to undertake integration of the entire applications development and deployment platform in order to provide an infrastructure designed for DevOps. Following that acquisition, VMware launched VMware Tanzu, a portfolio of products and services designed to automate the life cycle of modern apps, execute them with Kubernetes on the entire set of clouds, and integrate their operational management. For its part, the acquisition of Octarine will make it possible to extend VMware's intrinsic security strategy to containers and Kubernetes environments. As for machine learning applications, VMware aims to virtualize graphic processors (GPUs) in the same way as CPUs, thanks to the acquisition of Bitfusion in August 2019, thereby reducing their operational cost. The integration of Bitfusion with vSphere should accelerate the adoption of AI with its offer of an "Elastic Infrastructure for AI/ML Applications".
Every protagonist must find its place on the cloud chessboard. The cloud market is the stuff of dreams. According to Forrester, it will approach 300 billion dollars in 2020. Only the major cloud providers can hope to play a role in the international arena. This requires considerable investments both in infrastructures and R&D. It is hard to compete with AWS' 175 cloud services or IBM's 60 data centers. Some consolidation is to be expected yet we can see that the 2,400 European cloud providers who are VMware partners are still able to thrive by capitalizing on their differentiation. While some promote their regional proximity, others take pride in their national solution, such as OVHCloud. Faced with the multitude of services offered by hyperscalers around infrastructures, AI, blockchain, or the IoT, numerous players are advertising their highly specialized expertise, industry-specific solutions, or the compliance of their products to local or European regulation. Over the coming months we can expect to see new partnerships emerge between major cloud providers investing heavily in infrastructure solutions and smaller ones turning away from infrastructure to focus on services with clear added value. VMware would like to assist these partnerships, which are sure to benefit customers.
Companies are progressively transforming into "application factories" in order to innovate, and therefore increasingly require the modernization of their IT. All new technologies are interact and help with this transformation. This is fascinating but also requires the monitoring of all forthcoming evolutions. To help you with this task, I invite you to participate in VMworld 2020, which will be held as a virtual event from September 30th to October 1st.