One of the companies drawing significant amounts of attention at this year’s EMC World event is VMware, Inc., which will be under Dell, Inc.’s control once the EMC merger is complete. However, VMware is currently going full steam with its own developments.

John Gilmartin, VP and GM of the Integrated Systems Business Unit at VMware, Inc., sat down with John Walls and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about some of the ways the company is looking to address customer needs, how it’s keeping its software products accessible and what it anticipates from the market.

Solidifying the platform

Gilmartin noted early on in the discussion, “When you have a software product, you want it to be a platform, and you want it to run across a broad set of hardware.” While he acknowledged that this has served VMware quite well in many cases, “We also saw that there is a segment of the marketplace that wants a more tightly engineered solution and something that’s really more of an appliance experience, with kind of a wrap-around in terms of that appliance-user interface,” he explained.

Attempting to meet the desires of this market segment has led VMware to experiment with a number of solutions, from their VxRail hyper-convergence toolset to the use of weekly software iterations to get feedback from customers in quick order to influence continued development. With VxRail’s wide deployment, Gilmartin felt that, so far, it’s been landing solidly with consumers, with VMware looking to follow up on that success in short order.

Clouds, networks and consumers

In addition to the appliance-seekers, Gilmartin addressed a number of other market forces. “The market as a whole has seen that there’s a still-small but growing, and probably growing faster, segment of the market that’s looking to buy things: looking to buy solutions or looking to buy outcomes,” he said. “We do recognize that there’s segments that are looking at OpenStack, and so we’ve invested quite a bit in that.” And among these various growing segments, Gilmartin said, “Network virtualization clearly is one of the fastest things happening in the marketplace right now.”

On a broader scope, Gilmartin stated, “[VMware’s] strategy for cloud is kind of simple. It’s first and foremost, we want to build a great private cloud solution, and then we want to help build a set of compatible clouds in the marketplace.” As he noted, cloud allows companies to engage in the development of small projects that aren’t assured to make it to full production without overinvesting in compute and capacity to hold these efforts, something that appeals to both small and large-scale enterprises.

Looking ahead, Gilmartin felt confident about the future of VMware and its range of development efforts. “As an organization … people see we have a pretty clear strategy, and that’s what helps you get through these periods of change.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE