The edge of network computing has become a new point of focus thanks to the rise of connected devices. As businesses digitize services through mobile applications and wireless sensors, new challenges force companies to rebuild computing infrastructure and centralizing cloud management. Satyam Vaghani (pictured), vice president of technology at Nutanix Inc., shared his view on how his company is approaching the challenge.

“In a word or two words it’s edge computing for sure. … I’ve been working on what defines that operating system that can converge the edge and the cloud into one seamless piece,” Vaghani said. 

Vaghani spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren) of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed different approaches for unifying the edge and cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Potential for a unified approach?

Both VMware Inc. and Nutanix have made efforts toward unifying the edge and cloud environments, but each are taking slightly different approaches. Nutanix is taking an application-centered approach, while VMware is leveraging its networking infrastructure to connect the edge and cloud.

“AHV, the distributed storage fabric that Nutanix has, I think that is a great substrate on top of which to now build a much more application oriented, edge computing stack,” Vaghani said. “The VMware story I would imagine is kind of the same, although VMware is remarkably leading with NSX because the extended network between the cloud and the edge is obviously a great problem to solve.” 

Rather than create competing solutions and fragmenting the market, Vaghani see’s an opportunity for the two companies to collaborate on a single solution that approaches from both applications and infrastructure perspectives.

“In some sense the two stories are evolving in a very congruent manner; we’ll see. I think the market is so big and the use cases are so diverse that, for a change, we can potentially do it in a cooperative manner,” Vaghani said. “We can probably evolve an interesting standard, interesting stack that is kind of stable. I think this could potentially be a story of cooperation as opposed to throwing stones at each other, but time will tell.” 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Nutanix Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE