The two industry giants addressed questions centered on customer service, containers, VMware AppDefense and A.I.
CEO of VMware Pat Gelsinger and CEO of Dell Technologies Michael Dell took questions this week at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nev. Topics covered were wide and varied, ranging from customer support on one end to how artificial intelligence will change the world on the other end.
VMware and Amazon Web Services announced last October they were teaming up in order to assist enterprise customers in combining VMware environments with the AWS cloud. That same year, Dell Technologies announced it was bringing VMware on board as a partner. Commenting on the partnership between the two companies, Dell said it was “like peanut butter and chocolate. The more we do together the better it gets.”
Dell also spoke about the important role VMware is playing in multi-cloud management at VMworld. “When you imagine forward in this world of multi-cloud, there is absolutely no question that the answer isn’t public or private — it’s both,” he said. “In that world, the capabilities that VMware has are absolutely incredibly valuable to connect to all of the public clouds.” VMware had announced its service was currently available in one region, and that it would be available for all Amazon Web Services regions in 2018.
In addition, VMware and Pivotal Software debuted Pivotal Container Service, a new product that allows service providers to deploy “product-ready Kubernetes” on VMware vSphere and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Commenting on the project, Dell said “containers are a direction of the future.”
Dell also addressed questions concerning VMware AppDefense, which keeps tabs on data centers in an effort to improve application security. He said given VMware AppDefense’s placement in the software stack, in addition to the incorporation of third-party security software, users ought to be able to address several security tools and methods in the market.
“What I’ve heard from customers is a deep frustration,” Dell said. “In applications I have two or three partners, infrastructure two or three partners. In security I’ve got 75 partners. The seams between all these different partners creates all kinds of problems and challenges. AppDefense, really building this into the hypervisor in a deep and thoughtful way, is exactly the kind of solution that’s needed.”
In terms of the rapid pace of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Gelsinger commented that while these technologies are major application trends, they aren’t exactly new. He noted artificial intelligence has been under development for over three decades back to when he was with Intel working on the 486 processor. Gelsinger said A.I. is more effective today thanks to the scalability of compute and data.
