The first day of the VMworld conference got started with a keynote address that may have felt like Christmas morning to some VMware Inc. customers.

The company put a lot of networking and virtualization gifts under the tree for each attendee to unwrap. Much like a Santa Claus of cloud, Ray O’Farrell (pictured), executive vice president and chief technology officer of VMware, said he gets to have fun letting customers know all the “cool work” the engineering elves are doing behind the scenes.

“We’ve had a lot of products, a lot of technologies under development for the last few years,” said O’Farrell. “A lot of them are now starting to see fruition and the light of day.”

The “red bicycle” of the day had to be an announcement around a new partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc., called Amazon Relational Database Service on VMware. It’s designed to make it easier for network administrators to run databases across more servers, regardless of whether those machines are on-premises or hosted by Amazon. This creates a bridge between on-premises and public cloud, making access to services that much easier.

To discuss this new AWS partnership, as well as the Networking Virtualization and Security Platform, known as NSX, O’Farrell spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas. (* Disclosure below.)

The application is a network

In a multicloud world, O’Farrell sees the role of VMware as making sure enterprises can work seamlessly across all of the clouds. He thinks that software-defined networking had a promise to deliver highly flexible, easily configured and in many ways automated or policy-driven network infrastructure. NSX delivers on that promise, performing its tasks with flexibility and fluidity, he added. As such, it’s the centerpiece to much VMware connectivity.

Since NSX is not tied to a specific infrastructure, it can run on public, private or hyperconverged infrastructure. It’s the same NSX, no matter where it runs. It enables networks to be brought up quickly, connected to each other, and reliably communicate with each other, O’Farrell explained. And because it’s software-defined and flexible, it can react quickly to potential security issues.

“It moves the networking layer up a level, [so] that layer is closer to the application,” O’Farrell said. “Because it’s software-defined, because it’s flexible … the application and the network are intimately bound together.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s weeklong coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE