VMware Inc. is using this week’s Dell Technologies World 2018 conference in Las Vegas this week to outline a vision for end-to-end networking that’s long on promise and short on specifics.

The company is also cozying up to Microsoft Corp. with improved support for the Azure infrastructure-as-a-service platform, underscoring earlier statements that its partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. isn’t exclusive.

VMware said the Virtual Cloud Network roadmap it’s unveiling today is a “vision for enabling businesses to connect, secure and optimize the delivery of applications and data in an era when the majority of workloads exist outside the data center.” That vision will be delivered with four significant enhancements to the company’s networking portfolio that virtualize networking between the data center, remote offices and multiple clouds with consistent management and reporting.

“We’ve been at this longer than anyone,” said Rajiv Ramaswamy, chief operating officer of  product and cloud services at VMware. “We have a history of building and scaling operating across multiple underlying platforms.”

The plan provides the first tangible outcome of the company’s recent acquisition of VeloCloud Networks Inc.. VMware has re-branded VeloCloud’s technology as NSX SD-WAN and said it will integrate it with its NSX Data Center and VMware NSX Cloud virtual networks.

SD-WAN technology virtualizes wide-area networking to ease the often complex and time-consuming task of managing equipment in remote offices where “the time it takes to get one branch office up and running usually runs into months,” said Sanjay Uppal, vice president, general manager of VeloCloud business unit. What’s more, he added, “applications keep changing.”

New integration between NSX Data Center and NSX Cloud is intended to enable customers to apply consistent networking and security policies from the data center to the branch to the cloud with central visibility and control. It also supports segmentation of traffic so that Wi-Fi bandwidth in a branch, for example, can be managed independently of corporate traffic.

NSX Hybrid Connect is another new piece in the cloud puzzle. VMware company said it will enable customers to “seamlessly migrate workloads from any VMware environment to a modern software-defined data center environment running on-premises, in the public cloud or operated by a VMware cloud partner,” with a single point of control via the vRealize cloud management and optimization suite.

Inside the walls of the corporation, NSX Data Center is being enhanced with support for containerized cloud-native and bare-metal applications. Containers are lightweight software environments that abstract underlying infrastructure away from the application, enabling easier migration between platforms. Bare-metal applications run directly on a hardware computing platform, usually to achieve optimum performance. Forthcoming enhancements will provide consistent networking services to all applications and deployment models, the company said, along with accelerated performance for distributed workloads.

VMware is also extending a tiny olive branch to Microsoft by adding Azure support to NSX Cloud. The two companies have collaborated sporadically on on-premises initiatives but have clashed in the cloud, most recently over a Microsoft Azure migration initiative that targeted VMware’s on-premises customers directly.

Adding Azure to existing AWS support is a practical move for VMware, whose customers are increasingly looking to move workloads smoothly across multiple cloud platforms. The company said it will add native controls for Azure customers to use as part of their multicloud strategy.

The company provided no timetable for delivery, although Ramaswamy said, “Everything we’re talking about today has been delivered and is being adopted at scale” in test environments. Pricing wasn’t disclosed.

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