In his keynote remarks to open VMworld 2019 in San Francisco on Monday, Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s chief executive officer, made clear his company would be a significant multicloud player.

The problem for Gelsinger (pictured0 and VMware is that technology spending data shows customers may be doubling down on public cloud commitments at the expense of on-premises infrastructure, which could pose issues down the line for the company.

“[Gelsinger] said ‘any workload, any [application], any cloud,’ and that vision has been fairly consistent,” said Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the keynote analysis at the VMworld event in San Francisco. “At the same time, the data clearly shows that cloud is negatively impacting the VMware spend. If you don’t own a public cloud, you better convince your customers and your ecosystem that the future is in ‘our’ definition of cloud, which is multicloud, and that’s what this VMworld is all about.”

Vellante spoke with co-hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman, and they discussed the role of virtual machine technology and the potential for multicloud to become over-hyped (see the full interview with transcript here).

Containers and app support

Gelsinger’s remarks and many of the announcements released by VMware focused on Kubernetes integration and application support. Analysts who had been attending the annual conference since the early days noted a shift away from a focus on virtual machines.

“When we started coming back in 2010, the virtual machine was the center of the universe,” Miniman said. “Today, we’re not talking about virtual machines at the center. We’re talking about containers, we’re talking about cloud native applications, and that multicloud world was absolutely what Pat Gelsinger discussed front and center.”

Recent survey data provided by Enterprise Technology Research found that the multicloud opportunity remained wide open as the early market was still forming. Many firms, including Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and VMware, were well-positioned to compete. Yet, the early market also meant that the hype cycle was likely just beginning.

“It’s just starting to be hyped and probably will then be overhyped, and then, seven years from now, we’ll start to see multiple clouds become truly interoperable,” Furrier noted. “Enterprises have multiple vendors or multiple environments that happen to involve those vendors who have cloud. I don’t think it actually is an operating model yet.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event:

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE