VMware Inc. signaled its intention to become a major player in the Kubernetes container space with the introduction of Tanzu at VMworld one year ago. It hasn’t taken its foot off the gas since.

The company’s expanding Tanzu portfolio now includes Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Tanzu Application Service and Tanzu Mission Control as a centralized management platform. In early September, the firm injected Tanzu into vSphere, vSAN, VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation in advance of additional Tanzu announcements made as part of this year’s VMworld event.

“We have half a million customers running on our virtualization sets of products that have made us successful for 20 years, with 70 million virtual machines, but we have to earn that right in containers,” said Sanjay Poonen (pictured), chief operating officer of VMware. “We now have Tanzu in standard, advanced and enterprise editions with lots of packaging behind which makes it a very broad and deep platform. I don’t think it will be 20 years before there’s a billion containers and we seek to be the leader in that platform.”

Poonen spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during VMworld. They discussed Tanzu’s impact for the firm’s customer base, building new inroads into the developer community and VMware’s ongoing pursuit of intrinsic enterprise security. (* Disclosure below.)

Container use cases grow

VMware set the stage for its presence in the container space with the acquisition of Heptio Inc. in 2018 for $550 million and its purchase of Pivotal Software Inc. for $2.7 billion last year. The company has seen an expansion of use cases among its customers as a result of Tanzu adoption, according to Poonen.

“Large banks are increasingly standardizing a lot of their consumer-facing or wealth-management applications, anything they are building rapidly, on this container platform,” Poonen said. “A lot of the world during the pandemic is now doing e-commerce and curbside pickup; people aren’t going to the store. That’s all based on Tanzu.”

Increased interest in Tanzu for VMware also offers an opportunity to build further inroads into the developer community. The company brought an audience of developers into its fold through two previous acquisitions involving the web application development firm SpringSource Inc. and Bitnami Inc., an application packaging solutions provider.

“It’s about 2 million to 3 million from the Spring community and 2 million to 3 million from the Bitnami community,” Poonen said. “One thing you learn about developers is you can’t have a mindset of ‘you all come to just us.’ If you try to take over that world, the developer community just basically shuns you. You have to have a very vibrant way in which you are mingling.”

A portion of the news coming out of VMworld included announcements focused on security in the enterprise. Since acquiring Carbon Black Inc. for $2.1 billion in 2019, VMware has moved to make security intrinsic with infrastructure, including its most recent release of Carbon Black Cloud Workload with a free six-month integration for vSphere users.

“We have 70 million virtual machines; we have 75 million virtual switches; we have tens of millions of Workspace ONE and Carbon Black endpoints that we manage and secure,” Poonen said. “It’s incumbent on us to take security and make it a lot more part of the infrastructure and reduce the need for dozens and dozens of point tools. You’re going to see us making this a long-term play.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE