The cloud has been a priority on business agendas for years — not just tech leaders anymore, as the world modernizes applications and data by moving it to an increasingly user-friendly cloud.

With VMware Inc.’s modern application and management strategies, the company helps organizations fast track their application modernization journeys, allowing development directly on the public cloud, among other innovative methods, all designed to extricate and simplify a company’s migration to the cloud. With the combination of the Tanzu and Aria portfolios, VMware introduced the ability to expand the capabilities of multicloud and multi-cluster Kubernetes solutions.

“Over 70% of organizations now have Kubernetes in production, not one or two clusters, but hundreds of clusters,” said Ajay Patel (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of the modern application platform business at VMware. “Tanzu is about making modern applications real, helping you design, develop, build and run these applications. And with Aria, we’re fundamentally changing the game around multicloud management.”

Patel spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at last August’s VMware Explore event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the supercloud, the joining of Tanzu with Aria, modernizing applications and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Superclouds begin to form

The cloud transformation has hit the inflection point where it’s no longer all about a single team, as the amount of developer positions available has inflated. Positions such as “Head of Developer Experience” have popped up, an unheard-of title two years ago. This is a symptom of growth, as the channels for making critical DevOps decisions have become more sophisticated, according to Patel.

One example, Patel pointed out, is a Chicago wealth management company that VMware is assisting with their modernization journey. The company is building a next-generation wealth management application, a fundamental refactor of the legacy application.

“They are putting APIs in front of their main systems. They’re not rewriting the core banking or the core platform, but the user experience, the business logic and the AI/ML capability to bring intelligence to the platform. It’s surrounding the capability to make it much more intuitive, much more usable, much more declarative,” Patel explained. “That’s where things are going. I’m seeing this mix of integration all over again. The new enterprise application integration (EAI) is now microservices and messaging and events with the same patterns being much more accelerated with cloud-native services.”

With the supercloud rising in popularity, with the prospect of a hyperscaled or multicloud solution attracting business leaders everywhere, it’s been a big topic over the past year. Expanding edge capabilities, increasingly portable management and a simplified supply chain are all innovations on the horizon for the cloud, all supported by multicloud solutions and the consistent rescaling of infrastructure.

“This supercloud is the next set of super platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services. And the management service is to use the cloud. We spend so much time as VMware building clouds, the problem seems, how do you effectively use the cloud? What problems do we solve when every company is a digital company and the product is this application?” Patel asked. “Everything starts with an application, and you look at it from the lens of how you run the application, what it costs the application, what impact it’s driving.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore:

(* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMWare nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE