Developers are the modern enterprise’s beating heart. And with things like the pervasiveness of open-source code and application programming interfaces, they’re basically served the tools and resources they need to produce at a high level.

“I think the big thing happening is that we are seeing the true separation of capacity delivery from capacity consumption in computing,” said James Urquhart (pictured, right), distributed systems technology leader at VMware Inc. “And what I mean by that is the abstractions that bled between the idea of a server and the idea of an application have become separated much better.”

At last year’s VMware Explore event, Urquhart and Keith Townsend (pictured, left), principal of The CTO Advisor, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the industry perspective on supporting developers versus supporting infrastructure, particularly from a VMware standpoint. (* Disclosure below.)

Assessing the problem statement

Overfocusing on developer experience isn’t inherently harmful. The problem exists because it’s being done in such a way that is detrimental to other core IT areas — such as infrastructure, according to Townsend.

“I think we’re doing a disservice to the industry,” he explained. “Developer experience is super important, but we’re focusing on developer experience to the detriment of infrastructure. The infrastructure to deliver that developer experience across the industry just isn’t there.”

The premise is that while most solutions provider’s aim to “meet the developers where they’re at,” the underpinnings and underlying requirements for that aren’t yet fully baked.

“We’re not at a point where we can just write code infrastructure code and complex things happen,” Townsend added. “VMware needs the latitude to do that work while doing stuff like innovating on tap. Companies might not be meeting developers where they’re at, but they’re doing the hard work of normalizing across clouds.”

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