VMware Explore has often been seen as more of a business-focused event, where new developments to existing products/solutions are showcased.

However, there’s an underlying developer focus of late, especially in relation to VMware Inc.’s Tanzu, the company’s cloud-native application platform for accelerated operations, development and delivery across clouds. But with the Broadcom Inc. acquisition looming and reports emerging of an intent to trim VMware’s portfolio, what could the future of Tanzu hold?

“One of the things that I often hear from the CIOs in organizations is their number one challenge is modernization,” said Paul Nashawaty (pictured), principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “When you look at using open source, organizations have to pay for it one way or another. Either they have a bench to do it or they go to an enterprise-level product. If you go the Tanzu route, you may have the opportunity to stand something up much faster than standing up in an open-source environment — so there’s the pay-off. If you want to go with a faster time to value, you may go with an enterprise solution.”

Nashawaty spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay at VMware Explore 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the current positioning of Tanzu and how it can better fit into VMware’s unification ethos. (* Disclosure below.)

Tanzu in its current form

VMware has built quite the name for itself with solutions like vSphere and vSAN to address enterprise virtualization and hyperconverged infrastructure needs. Tanzu has always played somewhere in the middle of that lineup. However, for the company not to become commoditized, it needs to think beyond just infrastructure by taking offerings like Tanzu and weaving it tighter into the larger lineup so as to “move up the stack,” according to Nashawaty.

“By moving up stack, adding in the Tanzu pieces, adding in tools like Transformer, and that’s when we talk about modernization — Transformer helps accelerate that modernization for those applications,” he explained. “That’s something that they can’t do with just the infrastructure side of business alone. If they move off Tanzu, say post-acquisition … if they do, they’re going to need to partner with something like Tanzu in order to be competitive.”

Another angle to keep Tanzu relevant is by positioning it as the linchpin of a multicloud strategy. Here, it will sit as the hub and spawn across workloads stood up in multiple clouds. This is especially important, since 65% of ESG survey respondents reported using four or more separate clouds, and 96% answered for two or more cloud providers, according to Nashawaty.

“One of the things that they introduced at Explore this year was moving away from just the Aria Hub that focuses on the VMware Cloud to the Tanzu Hub to really start spawning across these multiple clouds,” he pointed out. “When you look at containerization and microservices, portability of applications, integration to the rest of the infrastructure, we see that 33% of organizations see that as a core part of their modernization play.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore 2023:

(* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for VMware Explore 2023. VMware Inc. and other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE