VMware Inc. failed in its first attempt to establish a public cloud presence, but now it’s back with what it hopes is a better approach.

Leveraging its reputation as a consistent layer that operates across multiple clouds and on-premises data centers, the VMware Cloud that the company is introducing today is a distributed platform that it said enables organizations to use and manage multiple cloud platforms from a single control point.

Trudge to the cloud

“Most CIOs will tell you digital business is not going as fast as they would want,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer for products and cloud services. “Transforming apps is hard work and migration to the cloud is going slowly because of application dependencies on each other.”

Those factors, combined with a shortage of developers, mean “customers are building siloes of app and infrastructure expertise on each cloud and in the data center,” a phenomenon sometimes called “unintentional multi-cloud,” Raghuram said. “How to manage and secure a distributed multicloud environment with consistent infrastructure and both traditional and modern applications will be the central challenge over the next decade.”

The new offerings are intended to address organizations’ growing appetite for outfitting their legacy applications with cloudlike features. VMware cited internal research that found that 90% of application initiatives are focused on modernization and 80% of organizations deploy applications in a distributed model across data center, cloud and the edge of the network.

Multicloud subscription

Today’s announcement encompasses two new products and a subscription pricing planned called VMware Cloud Universal that simplifies the purchase and consumption of VMware multicloud infrastructure and management services.

The company said Cloud Universal is meant for customers that have a hybrid cloud architecture, are uncertain about cloud migration timelines, need to “burst” out of local infrastructure to the cloud or want to pay for on-premises infrastructure as an operating expense. They can purchase credits for VMware’s multicloud infrastructure and management service and apply them to VMware Cloud Foundation on premises, VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud or the VMware Cloud on Dell EMC cloud from Dell Technologies Inc.

Customers can buy once and deploy any eligible service at any time during the contract period. Unused Cloud Foundation credits can be converted for use on VMware Cloud on the AWS or Dell platform at any time. VMware Tanzu Standard edition, a modernization platform based on the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers, is included along with the VMware vRealize Cloud Universal software-as-a-service suite for multicloud management. Buyers also get access to VMware Success 360, a consulting and implementation service for cloud migration.

‘Simplify and accelerate’

The offering is “designed to simplify and accelerate the purchase and consumption of VMware multicloud management services,” said Mark Lohmeyer, general manager of cloud services at VMware. “Think of it as a flexible subscription offering for the multicloud.”

VMware Cloud Console is a new offering that provides “end-to-end visibility and control across the entire VMware infrastructure on prem, in the cloud and at the edge,” Lohmeyer said. Customers can use it to allocate, manage and optimize their VMware Cloud resources as well as to redeem credits and provision deployments of VMware Cloud Universal-eligible offerings.

VMware App Navigator is a new service that helps organizations assess and set priorities for application transformation based on the value of each application. It’s a targeted four-week engagement that uses agile techniques to analyze a company’s portfolio and scale the modernization and migration process.

“We do a quick discovery and assessment and it’s all automated,” said Ajay Patel,  general manager for VMware’s modern applications business. “The idea is to show results in a very tight order.”

With more than 85 million workloads running on its Cloud Foundation platform, VMware clearly thinks it’s in a position to undergird its customers’ modernization effort. “Customers can run their applications in a consistent way wherever they want,” Raghuram said. “Developers can connect to the native cloud services and IT can manage and secure them all in a centralized fashion.”

VMware Cloud Console and App Navigator are available today with Cloud Universal immediately available in English-speaking regions. The VMware Cloud Foundation Subscription is only available through Cloud Universal. The Cloud Foundation Subscription to VMware Cloud on AWS is expected to be available in before the end of April, with convertibility to VMware Cloud on Dell EMC expected to be available in the second half of the year.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE