iTWire - Where is VMware’s “True North?”

Thursday, 24 August 2023 21:12

Where is VMware’s “True North?” Featured

Image by Alexander Lesnitsky from Pixabay

At yesterday’s VMware press conference, we asked senior executives what the company’s guiding principles were.

CEO Raghu Raghuram and CTO Kit Colbert offered their thoughts.

iTWire: We’d like to get a little bit more philosophical about the company and would like to ask what is VMware's 'true north?' Now I don't want you to be twee and say something like ‘Respect the customer.' I'd like you to be a little deeper in your response and think about where the company is going and what your guiding principle is.

CEO Raghu Raghuram: Someone said something halfway through this press conference; he said “our mission is to accelerate our customers innovation.” So that attitude captures how VMware will go to market. So we'll look at what are the hard problems standing in the way of customers, building new and great things by themselves - and many will tend to be infrastructure problems. We said that we know how to do this infrastructure better than most other companies. So, let's put all of our energies there, I think it's true that the kind of [inaudible] that our customers are able to do is very possible on the infrastructure platforms that we build.

The second thing that's near and dear to our heart is choice. The choices we firmly believe, especially in the enterprise customer space. Customers will adopt an approach that needs to be real for them to execute their applications and their infrastructure [inaudible] the technologies that our customers want - the things that make them successful. So these are to use your word, philosophies that have been consistent right from 1998. S I don't know if I'm answering your question, but those have been key elements that we think about all the time.

Kit Colbert, CTO: So that's a great question. I think a lot about ‘what is the core of what we do?’ What I see a lot, is it goes back to that term ‘infrastructure’ and I'm going to use the term a little bit loosely, that's not to say exactly what infrastructure would be, but more broadly. So one of the things that's always been true for us, if we think about the stack of technology, was kind of the infrastructure side. We've always had the infrastructure side. And, you look at what we did originally with virtualisation, the reason that worked was because of the fact that were standards and in fact, the x86 processor, really standardised what we would build.

What's been interesting over the last 25 years, is that this stack, the delineation between infrastructure and applications has changed, with the line of delineation actually moving up the stack. So there's more and more things that most of us would consider 'infrastructure' versus 'app' and that's made a huge opportunity for us as a company, and what you're seeing as we expand dramatically in all those other areas that weren't traditionally considered infrastructure, you look at things like Kubernetes a lot of what Kubernetes can be considered to be middleware. But now it's considered infrastructure. And that's because of the standardisation that’s there.

So for us, it is a focus on infrastructure. I think the opportunity for us is the fact that as an industry, we are maturing and we are standardising more and more of these layers, which gives us, as VMware, the opportunity to come in and contain a lot of complexity. That's what we've done the whole time, contain complexity And I think that will continue and you’ve seen it in a lot of the decisions we make. Now, as I’ve mentioned before, we're not getting into the foundation model business. That's kind of an app side of things from an API perspective. There's a lot of other great folks that are doing it, they should go do it. I think we want to stay on the infrastructure side, but because of the fact that the infrastructure line, so to speak, is always rising, we think that gives us just tremendous opportunities going forward. We definitely know all of this to be true for VMware.

The author is attending VMware’s conference as a guest of the company.

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