When they hear the term “digital transformation,” many people think: “Throw hardware overboard like you’re on the Titanic and get into this life jacket called cloud.” It’s a “too long; didn’t read” note to a story they ought to read through.

“The goal is not to get rid of hardware; the goal is to get more value out of your data,” said Peter Burris (@plburris) (pictured, center), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “I don’t think customers have fully grokked the idea or fully conceived of the idea that their data’s the most important asset.” Those that do may like VMware Inc.’s cross positioning across environments with data as top priority.

The data is ultimately what digital transformation and the modern data center — a company’s own or a cloud provider’s — has fealty to, Burris said during today’s VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Along with co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) (right) and David Floyer (@dfloyer) (left), Burris analyzed the companies best positioned to extract value from data. (* Disclosure below.)

On-premises hardware is not in any intrinsic way better than cloud for building business around data. Joining data with cloud or “cloud experiences” is crucial, Burris stated. However, picking a public cloud platform out of a hat and stuffing all data there is not a productive strategy for most. Many will be better off combining clouds — perhaps a true private cloud with some public clouds, instead.

“One of the biggest challenges that customers are going to have is, how are they going to weave multiple clouds together so that you have a coherent application or set of workloads that you can manage?” Burris asked. VMware is priming its NSX virtualized network and security platform to be a foundation for multicloud, he stated.

Cloud dress rehearsal finally done?

VMware has struggled to find a cloud strategy in the past. “They tried a lot of different things, and none of them worked,” Vellante said, noting vCloud Air’s failure.

Its evolving deal with Amazon Web Services Inc. and the expansion of its Cloud Foundation, however, should give VMware some credibility in cloud, according to Floyer.

“The knock-on effect of the agreement with AWS gave confidence, I believe, to VMware customers that they had a a path forward,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE