During the second day of the VMworld 2016 conference, several representatives of VMware, Inc. and associated companies took the stage for keynote presentations, introducing a number of new solutions, showing new sides to existing utilities and sharing how customer companies are using VMware’s virtualization tools to solve their business challenges.

Digital transformations

Sanjay Poonen, GM of End-User Computing, and head of Global Marketing and Communications at VMware, Inc., was the first to take the stage, arriving with enthusiasm as he declared that the coming technological revolution “is going to be huge, because it’s going to influence every part of our lives.” He shared that VMware has a focus on “digitally transforming the end-user, preparing it for that digital cloud era. … We’re making this vision of any cloud, any app.”

Describing the path that VMware has followed to this point, Poonen said, “What we sought to do … was take component spaces … and bring them together into one holistic whole.” One of the biggest challenges identified in this development was finding a balance between the wants of end-users and tech people: “The users, they want choice. IT wants control,” he said.

Poonen also noted that VMware has prioritized “making our solutions cloud-first,” while concentrating on three layers: Apps and identity working together, desktop and mobile unified end-point management, and unified security underlying all of it.

Bringing the tools together

A major piece on display was Workspace ONE, an interface that brings together various apps for a greater degree of control and interconnectivity, allowing such streamlining as could be used for suggested responses. One example was automation in the line of predictive time-slots for making appointments based on calendar app data, though more revenue-focused utilization was also shown.

Stephanie Buscemi, EVP of Product and Solutions Marketing at Salesforce.com, Inc., was brought onstage to share her company’s usage of similar VMware tools, including the service to “hundreds of partners” using SalesForce’s version of the Workspace ONE unified interface. “It really just all starts with: We want to be able to deploy and manage apps for our customers,” Buscemi said, and then she moved on to highlight SalesForce’s introduction of Sales Wave, an app for the sales user, with management overviews, team summaries, granular examination, quota assessment, opportunity location and more.

As Poonen stated after Buscemi’s conclusion, to VMware, its “apps partners are very important.” The company is also looking to bring these mobile abilities to a greater degree of connectivity, and in his words, “As you think about the next layer, desktop and mobile coming together, we’ve been innovating like never before.”

Abstracting complexities

“Cracking the two seeds of cost and complexity” is one of VMware’s prime focuses moving toward its goals, and with the mobile platforms, there’s also an emphasis on “simplicity and security.”

The capabilities of the ecosystem and VMware computing were further demonstrated by the next guest, co-founder and CEO of Tanium, Inc., Orion Hindawi. Hindawi showed the ability of the Tanium interface to parse selective questions in normal English phrasing, quantify connected devices, check MD5 hash sums, take remote action on compromised devices, and compare qualities across all devices, all done in a matter of minutes. As Poonen said afterwards, “This is the way in which we believe we can help you prepare for tomorrow.”

Ray O’Farrell, VMware’s chief technology officer, took over from there, outlining some of VMware’s goals on the technical front and prefacing them with the statement: “We want to solve [the really hard problems] with you. We want to solve them once, and we want to solve them once and for all.”

“One of the things we’re hearing now is that you have to deal with a really interesting balancing act … agility and speed,” O’Farrell said. “But on the other hand … compliance [and] securing the applications associated with that [is important]. … This is felt most when you need to start bringing cloud-native applications into production.”

Security, scalability and compliance

Tailoring the work to all users involved is something of importance to VMware’s solutions creators. Kit Colbert, CTO of the Cloud Business Unit for VMware, addressed how containers are playing a role in making that happen in modern applications, as well as some of the inherent difficulties. “Containers for developers and in development — super-easy. … But in order to run anything in production, there’s a set of compliance guidelines that have to be met,” he said.

Colbert also explored VMware’s enterprise container infrastructure as unified platform (vSphere integrated containers) and cloud-native platform (Photon Platform), enabling portal access and overviews, project team management, provisioning, admin tools, NSX tools, troubleshooting, and ways to “get containerized applications running in production” and “drive radical simplicity into the architectures.”

Futurizing management

O’Farrell returned to the state to highlight software-defined data-centers before handing duties off to Rajiv Ramaswami, EVP/GM of Networking and Security for VMware, who addressed network virtualization along with moving to a software-centric approach to meet the needs of businesses.

Security, automation and application continuity were identified as the persistent challenges for companies, with micro-segmentation, “pioneered with NSX,” serving to “provide every application with its own firewall.” As Ramaswami noted, “If you’re unprepared when a disaster hits you, both your bottom line and your reputation are affected.”

Yanbing Li, SVP and GM of Storage and Availability at VMware, next discussed Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), cross-cloud storage management and Virtual SAN power, which was spotlighted as being the widest-deployed HCI solution with more than 5,000 customers; more than 64 percent are running business-critical applications.

In her words, “That’s what next-generation management looks like.”

Watch the complete General Session video below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE