Cloud-based information technology virtualization was the focus of VMworld 2018 this week in Las Vegas, not to mention the talk of the entire conference.

As the conference draws toward a close on Thursday, Wikibon looks back at the highlights from the dozens of on-camera executive interviews on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming mobile studio. Here are excerpts of some of the most insightful commentaries, followed by a cliplist of these segments as they appeared live on theCUBE this week from the event at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center:

Data is a central driver of cloud infrastructure evolution

Michael Dell, chief executive, Dell Technologies Inc.: “At the center of this there’s a relatively simple thing that’s happening. And it starts with data. And you know, this is no different than it was in the ’60s or ’70s with the beginnings of IT. Now, the cycle is going much faster. It starts with data. With your data, you make better products and services, and when you make better products and services you attract more customers, and you get more data. It’s just now, the number of devices, number of nodes and the network connectivity, and then you insert AI and machine learning and neural networks on top of the data, and then it goes even faster. And that wheel’s just spinning faster and faster and faster and it’s not going to slow down.”

Multicloud computing is being adopted at an accelerating pace

Joe Kinsella, founder and chief technology officer, CloudHealth Technologies Inc.: “What’s happened is in the last 24 months is enterprises went from being a single cloud to pervasive multicloud, [resulting in] their portfolios now including dozens of SaaS products, multiple public cloud providers, multiple private cloud providers. It’s just a very complex heterogeneous portfolio they’re managing.”

Hybrid cloud is an important enterprise milestone toward public cloud adoption

Sandy Carter (pictured, far left), vice president, Amazon Web Services Inc.: “We’ve been hearing from customers about the hybrid cloud, and how that’s a great onramp. How customers are starting with hybrid cloud before going to the public cloud.”

True private cloud experience is what everybody wants

Peter Fitzgibbon, VP and general manager of the VMware practice at Rackspace Inc., and David Trigg, global vice president of market development and service providers, Dell EMC: “I think the original promise, and maybe the threat of the cloud was everything was going at the cloud. As we’re learning through IoT and other new, emerging trends, that’s not realistic. Customers really have to think about the edge, their own data center, because their own data centers are not going away. They have to think about the SLAs that they’re providing to their end users, to their employees, and that’s where you have to place the application, the workload in the right place to enable the best customer experience for their customers and their employees.”

Optimized hardware is fundamental to software-defined everything

Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president and general manager, servers and infrastructure systems, Dell: “When you talk about software-defined anything, we, on the server infrastructure system side, always believe that your software has to run on something. It doesn’t run in ether. The whole point is, that’s where I think you’ve got to look at the right hardware partner to come and help you run your infrastructure, whether it is your platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service, all these run on a platform.”

Software-defined wide-area networking is a more powerful way to do application-level routing

Tom Burns, senior vice president of networking solutions, Dell EMC: “[Software-defined, wide-area network] is different, everything about it is different. It is an overlay. In terms of how you navigate, now there’s different concepts, you certainly need to look at traditional routing. I think the beauty that Velocloud offers, or SD-WAN offers, is now you’re almost talking about application-based routing…. It’s not totally replacing. We are able to use internet-based transport more heavily. Also, you get more capacity with it and then the technology, the software, provides almost like an application-based level.”

Flexibility and fluidity are core benefits of software-defined networking

Ray O’Farrell, CTO, VMware: “NSX [is] the centerpiece of a lot of VMware’s connection strategies to cloud and other things, including manageability. What should people know about NSX [is] that software-defined networking’s promise: highly flexible, easily configured, automated and policy driven…. So it’s all around that flexibility and fluidity.”

Hyperconverged infrastructure and DevOps play key roles in simplified multicloud management

Ben Gibson, chief marketing officer, Nutanix Inc.: “What really fueled this company’s growth in the earlier years was helping our customers get over hurdles. They’re just managing a tremendous amount of legacy environment so 90 percent-plus of IT man-hours [is] being spent on maintaining a lot of legacy infrastructure. And so the whole notion of hyperconverged, it was really about how do you make a lot of that go away or be invisible. But then you can take that same concept and move that forward now. So different workloads, mode one workloads, mode two workloads that are emerging here, and some of the inhibitors are actually relationship-based, so the infrastructure folks talk to the app developers, talk to the DevOps practices that may be going around IT.”

Customers want self-service simplicity in managing their multicloud IT infrastructure

Suresh Sathyamurthy, VP of cloud and infrastructure solutions marketing, Dell EMC: “AI is essentially in part of a data continuum where we started with data storage, expanded the use of analytics. And now, just the type of applications has changed. Data used to come from traditional applications. Now it’s coming from traditional applications, IoT devices, cloud-native applications. And data used to be stored for compliance and regulatory reasons. Now it is stored for the purposes of insights, to make business decisions. So I think a natural transition to any future application development is to think about it from a perspective of how you can gain insights. One of our Cloud Marketplace announcements is a product called CloudIQ. It’s a free software as a service application that can be accessed through your mobile phone that we are giving to your customers that will help manage your IT infrastructure through your mobile phone.”

You can see each of these interviews in their entirety here, as well as the many other interviews with executives representing wide range of Dell EMC and VMware business units, their partners and their customers.

Photo: TK