EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

At VMworld 2017, VMware announced the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS and of the six initial VMware Cloud Services. VMware Cloud on AWS offers customers the long expected capability of deploying VMware's Cloud Foundation Suite of SDDC products (vSphere, NSX and vSAN) to AWS. VMware Cloud Services enable operators, developers, security experts and compliance staff to consistently deploy and operate application infrastructure across today's most popular clouds: AWS, Google, Azure and vSphere. Today, both offerings, VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud Services are available from AWS U.S. West (Oregon Region), but can be used worldwide. VMware and Amazon are planning to roll out both offerings worldwide during 2018.

VMware’s container management strategy should be seen as the key to success for this year’s VMworld. VMware needs to conclusively convince its customers that instead of doing their own thing the company is able to offer a strong value proposition based  on the fact that Kubernetes and Amazon ECS are the key container technologies to embrace. DockerCon has shown that VMware admins have realized that it is time to “learn about containers,” but VMware’s challenge today is to convince customers that Kubernetes management will not happen entirely separately from virtualization management. Even worse, Kubernetes management may not even require virtualization at all.

“vRealize Automation really doesn’t have an API,” says a reputable partner of a VM-ware centric consulting firm, “they say that it does, but it still does not, so I won’t tell my customers that it does.” Then he goes on in a slightly agitated manner “,also, there is no easy-to-implement orchestrator and no central queueing system to tie together all the VMware components based on dynamically changing policy-defined app requirements.” “Then finally,” he continues, “I have yet another client who asked me to come back with ‘an alternative to vRA, as my developers just don’t want vRA."

Cisco’s Springpath Acquisition Will further Boost Its EMA Top 3 Winning Hyperconverged Portfolio

“Oh, I’m not coming to VMworld this year, we are at Jenkins instead.” This is a sentence I’ve heard quite a few times now from vendors that I’m used to seeing at VMworld and it makes me wonder what’s going on.

(You can read more about the content of the EMA Top 3 - Enterprise Decision Guide in my first Post)

(Click here to jump to the next part and read about how EMA selected its Top 3 products)

At its Discover event this week, HPE announced its own multi cloud management platform: HPE Project New Stack.

“It feels like magic but it is technology,” and “we will help transform every company into a software company,” were the two quotes by Michael Dell that best summed up the spirit of  Dell EMC World 2017. These statements show the genuine excitement of a seasoned tech executive to attack the next challenge of his career: merging the Dell EMC brands -Pivotal, VMware, RSA, SecureWorks, and Virtustream- into one highly differentiated IT powerhouse.