Happy New Year! As we enter the 2020 decade, I am very pleased to announce that VMware has completed the Pivotal acquisition, and I want to officially welcome Pivotal to VMware. (Read the close press release here).
Global enterprises understand that their success depends on delivering a unique, personalized digital experience to their customers, to their employees and to industry. This requires that they build, run and manage an integrated set of applications and services to deliver that experience. Even as they embrace a complex (even chaotic) world of multi-cloud , hybrid cloud, and cloud-native application development and cultural transformation, they also must seek pragmatic solutions which are enterprise-ready: industrialized offerings they can use today. And that’s where VMware’s and Pivotal’s strengths will be brought to bear—making these solutions easy-to-use and consumable in a pragmatic, enterprise-ready fashion.
Pivotal fundamentally strengthens our ability to deliver these solutions to our customers. Pivotal has the history and know-how of transforming the way some of the world’s largest companies build and run their most important applications. The combination of Pivotal’s modern applications expertise along with VMware’s sustained engineering excellence and product innovation brings together a deep collection of solutions, skill sets, people and leadership talent to take our solutions for modern application developers to the next level.
Enterprise IT and Modern Application Developers – Brought Together
Over the last two decades, VMware has transformed how enterprise IT has consumed and managed their infrastructure—taking them on a journey all the way from individual servers sitting in your data centers to today’s infrastructure consisting of edge, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. VMware has been at the heart of this journey, driving ever greater levels of efficiency, security and reliability across the infrastructure underlying IT. Today, as more and more companies transform themselves, their interactions with customers and employees are governed by the applications and services that they develop. Indeed, their ability to develop game-changing , unique and personalized applications will determine how well they outpace their competition. Those enterprises who get this right will be able to lead their markets.
As I think about how to best serve customers going forward, I’m focused on how to apply the strengths VMware has brought to the world of IT to solve the challenges enterprises face with modern application development from both a technical and cultural perspective.
With Pivotal, VMware has expanded its talent base and the products it can utilize to help solve this problem—extending beyond IT infrastructure into application development and allowing developers to deliver the agility that the business demands. Pivotal is key to these efforts: helping companies transform by evolving their company culture to drive agility and speed of delivery in a more secure fashion and not simply by implementing new technology.
More and more, the industry has made a choice, and that choice is that Kubernetes is the bridge between the infrastructure layer and the containerized applications running upon it. VMware is fully committed to open source software including the Kubernetes community, and we’ve made substantial contributions to Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure over the past 12 months. A sign of that commitment is integrating Kubernetes and container run-times with the core of vSphere via Project Pacific.
During the past year, we’ve completed the acquisition of Heptio for deep Kubernetes expertise. Additionally, we acquired Bitnami in May 2019. Bitnami’s packaged application catalog enables developers to quickly and easily deploy open source software onto the world’s leading cloud providers as well as on their own servers. Wavefront also plays a role in supporting our customers’ modern apps needs with an enterprise observability platform that automates and unifies enterprise Kubernetes and applications visibility to enterprises.
VMware has introduced this emerging portfolio of developer and application products and services as a unique and new VMware brand called Tanzu. VMware Tanzu is built upon our recognized infrastructure products and further expanded with the technologies that Pivotal, Heptio, Bitnami and many other VMware teams bring to this new portfolio of products and services. Our mission is to develop and deliver a complete stack, from infrastructure to application, to help enterprises build, run and manage modern applications with enhanced agility, security and efficiency. Foundational to this stack will be innovative open source technologies such as Kubernetes, PAS and Spring.
I can’t wait to get started down this journey now that the Pivotal team is on board.
About the Author
More Content by Ray O'Farrell
