Why wouldn't you make moves to target this huge market opportunity?
While it would be easy reading the headlines to assume that every organization under the sun is fully committed to the public cloud, the fact of the matter is that public cloud adoption—albeit massive and growing fast—is still the tip of the IT iceberg. For every few million dollars spent on public cloud infrastructure, there are hundreds and hundreds of millions spent on more traditional ways of delivering IT.
Which is where a company such as VMware comes in. VMware, which popularized the notion of virtualization—or creating multiple virtual servers on a single physical box—is often criticized (by me, as well) for being somewhat slow to innovate and really embrace the cloud world. But it’s not quite so simple as that—VMware has thousands of customers, huge market share and great existing revenues. It needs to move at an appropriate speed for all of these different stakeholders.
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One way it is moving, and a pragmatic way given the increasing heterogeneity in the marketplace, is by moving more into cross-platform management tools. VMware’s vRealize Suite is an orchestration and management platform that covers both legacy infrastructures and more modern approaches. It is a way, as VMware sees it, of giving its customers the best of both worlds.
And given VMware’s huge footprint, and the expectation that it can parlay that marketshare into adoption for these kinds of new products, it is unsurprising to see partners line up to integrate with these newer tools.
A case in point is infrastructure monitoring vendor ExtraHop, which today announced a couple of new integrations into vRealize. The integrations are into vRealize Orchestrator and vRealize Operations Manager and are designed to give customers deep insights into how their VMware-based infrastructure assets are performing. There are many benefits to this kind of “single pane of glass” approach towards infrastructure, including:
- Dynamic On-Demand Visibility: This provides the ability to automatically discover all VMware virtual machines and virtual switching as they are added to the environment, classifying and monitoring these assets without any additional configuration.
- Intelligent Automation: ExtraHop alerts can be used to kick off automated workflows using the vRealize platform to improve agility and reduce management overhead.
- Centralized Management for Complete Insight. ExtraHop surfaces rich wire data within vRealize Operations, combining it with machine data to deliver a view in a console VMware admins already use. This streamlined workflow allows VMware admins to understand the performance impact of orchestration in real time and monitor application workloads as they migrate across the data center.
The interesting thing here is that while we can argue about the timescale for public cloud adoption, the move towards software-defined infrastructure is more obvious. To put it simply, if you’re a traditional enterprise with largely a traditional approach towards IT, you can find a number of good reasons (legitimate or otherwise) to avoid the public cloud. What is harder to avoid is the efficiency that comes from moving to a virtualized/software-defined approach. These fabrics that support both traditional and software-defined architectures are a smart move.
As for ExtraHop being part of this, I have to agree with their take (albeit understandably biased) on the announcement:
“SDDCs have the potential to unlock a new horizon of IT and business agility, but the realities of deployment and monitoring are not always straightforward,” said John Leon, vice president of business development at ExtraHop. “The extensive management capabilities of the vRealize suite, coupled with rich wire data from ExtraHop, gives customers the global insight they need to take advantage of SDDC’s promise and transform IT operations in the process.”
Interesting times in infrastructure land.
