With so many companies vying for the attention and business of customers looking to handle their data and operations management, it’s no easy task to pull in and retain that commitment. For VMware, Inc., one of the main pieces of its efforts to win that battle comes in the form of unified access interfaces, though only time will tell how successful that effort is.

John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, began their continued examination of the VMworld 2016  conference following the second day’s opening round of keynote presentations during the General Session. Looking at these announcements, as well as the topics covered since yesterday’s event kickoff, theCUBE‘s team worked to pick out some of the most notable strengths and dangers for VMware and its partners.

Unified functionality

Miniman was quick to note the “wave of mobility and virtualization” that seemed to characterize the various presentations and their stated goals. In particular, the showing of unified access solutions, such as the Workspace ONE digital workspace interface, met the natural desires of end-users to have simplified ways to carry out their workloads, eliminating the need to jump through various log-ins and juggle data.

As Furrier pointed out, though, reliable security will likely prove to be the trouble point with these unified access interfaces, something that will have to be kept in mind by both the designers and users.

“Networking and storage need to go hand in hand as we build these environments,” Miniman agreed.

Meeting the needs

Also on the table was the swell of support and utility that Virtual SAN (VMware’s enterprise-class shared storage solution for hyper-converged infrastructure optimized for all-flash performance) has found since its rocky beginnings, a topic to which Miniman was able to lend his own personal experience through anecdotes of the disbelief surrounding the original launch in regards to initial predictions of success. Now, with Virtual SAN serving thousands of customers, the goal of “more homogeneity and more simplicity, to be able to get people out of that drudgery of the undifferentiated lifting,” as Miniman put it, is coming to fruition in a major way.

For VMware moving forward, Furrier felt that “data is going to be the value proposition,” and Miniman agreed, while noting that “moving data’s still very difficult.”

Another point discussed was the stiff competition VMware will be facing from competitors offering comparable or more extensive services, with some of its outpacing coming from unexpected sources. “If you ask me who’s more open today, Microsoft or VMware, I’m going to say Microsoft,” Miniman stated. He also returned to this point with the distinction between “being open” and “being open source,” picking out the detail that with so much integrated open-source components going into the solutions, “how do they actually capture value?”

Complexities of choice

With VMware’s offerings, theCUBE analysts felt that taking more feedback from developers would be a good move to help balance out the heavy focus on operators. “The feedback I got from the community [is that people want access and alterability, and] you can’t shrink-wrap that,” Miniman explained.

Miniman also looked at VMware’s history compared to their current goals, asking, “How is VMware going to work on that next generation of applications? … How does VMware go from a company that helped customers hold onto their old applications as long as possible to a company which drives innovation?”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE