As VMworld wrapped up its fourth and final day, the event left attendees plenty of time to digest the flurry of major acquisition news that preceded the conference and a series of announcements that were rolled out on Monday.

The question up for debate: Did the enterprise computing industry gain a better appreciation for VMware Inc.’s true impact?

“In almost a weird way, VMworld 2019 was more subdued than it could have been,” said Peter Burris, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, as the VMworld event wrapped up in San Francisco. “I almost wonder: Do they really know the tiger that they’re riding right now? There are a lot of enterprises out there that are truly starting to bank on these guys.”

Burris joined co-hosts John Furrier, David Floyer and Dave Vellante to discuss how VMware was moving aggressively into the hybrid cloud, fundamental differences with Amazon and the impact of VMware’s continued success on a key networking competitor (see the full interview with transcript here).

Extending to edge and beyond

The breadth of the announcements at VMworld, ranging from support for open source container management platform Kubernetes to deeply integrated multicloud functionality, showed VMware’s intent to extend its core data center business into the hybrid cloud world.

“I believe that the core of it is they’re taking their centralized data center platform and extending it to the edge and every other aspect,” Floyer said. “They’re trying to establish themselves as one of the core platforms for distributed hybrid processing. The biggest challenge for VMware is making themselves successful in the public cloud because Amazon Web Services owns that business.”

Against the backdrop of Amazon’s major standing in the public cloud, the analysts noted clear differences in positions. VMware expressed a strong belief that security was broken, in contrast with Amazon. And AWS has assiduously cultivated the developer community, a group where VMware still needs to grow relationships.

“There’s a lot of differences in the bets that VMware is making and the bets that Amazon is making,” Vellante said. “Can they both pay off? They probably can.”

A recent survey found that the success of NSX was having a negative impact on Cisco Systems Inc. in terms of spending decisions. VMware’s progress in the software-designed data center and work on behalf of telcos and 5G appear to be putting Cisco squarely the crosshairs, however modest about its success that the virtualization company may be.

“It kind of sounds like they are going after Cisco to me,” Furrier said. “They don’t want to brag too much because they still have a lot of work to do.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2019:

Photo: VMware