One of the biggest challenges for Vmware over the next few years lies in sustaining its current leadership, and to do so the vendor is seizing the opportunity to go deeper with its existing partners with new solutions that will help them to integrate virtualization even tighter with their customer’s IT environments.

Kicking off its annual VMworld conference yesterday, VMware unveiled a bevy of new products whilst CEO Pat Gelsinger vowed during his keynote that the vendor won’t let up until virtualization penetrates 100% of the data centre.

The next step in this mission is the network, and according to Gelsinger it’s all about the apps. The CEO pointed to four trends that he believes are driving IT today, including Big Data, cloud, social and mobile, all of which are putting existing infrastructure under pressure.

“It means more apps, more people and more data, all putting more pressure on the infrastructure you deliver,” said Gelsinger in his keynote.

These trends are causing headaches, but Vmware has the answer in the four key cornerstones of its software-defined data centre architecture – Automation, Compute, Networking and Storage. Yesterday the vendor announced new products in all four areas, but the most prominent by far was its new VMware NSX networking tool, which it bills as a platform for network virtualization.

NSX will integrate HP’s Virtual Applications Networks SDN, and is designed to let data centre operators virtualize their networking and security, viewing physical networks in much the same way we can view a virtualized server environment, together with unified automation, visibility and control. The automation is particularly important, according to HP’s vice president of networking Mike Banic in an interview with eWeek. Banic stated that today, the majority of network programming is performed manually, but that’s very difficult in today’s environments where cloud data center networks often need 10,000 provisions a day, with each one requiring 20+ network command line changes each day – something that equates to 3,333 man hours that this automation can eliminate.

VMware’s NSX announcement is one of a slew of new software-defined products its unveiled or planning to unveil at VMworld this week. We’re expecting to see several other announcements outside of networking this week, including vSphere 5.5, VMware’s bread and butter virtualization software, which will be offered with better support for both legacy business apps and Big Data.

With these products, VMware is trying to solve the problems that many big enterprises have – the fact that SDN involves a lot of new process changes and staff hires that most companies can ill afford. This is good for VMware’s big clients – the likes of GE, Citi and eBay, who all spoke about VMware’s concept of end-to-end software integration with SDN – but so far they don’t really answer the question posed by ServicesANGLE’s Bert Latmore recently – where does it go next?

As Latmore states, SDN and networking technologies are still immature, and while the integration provided by NSX might be enough to satisfy its biggest clients, it’s unclear whether or not this simplifies things enough to the point where you mid-sized enterprises might begin deploying it.