The State Of The Cloud – Ray O’Farrell
John Bensalhia talks to VMware’s CTO, Ray O’Farrell to discuss the latest cloud technology developments and trends, ahead of the upcoming Cloud Expo Europe London.
Why cloud?
We constantly hear about a wide range of technologies: AI, IoT, Big Data, Machine Intelligence to driverless vehicles and distributed ledger systems. The true power of such technology is through their connections. But in order to make all of these connections possible, there is a need for secure, elastic and automated cloud infrastructure.
A good cloud infrastructure offers up a myriad of possibilities and benefits. Among them – elasticity; scalability; agility; security; resilience; and the ability to consume your resources as a service model.
How does this affect customers?
Public clouds have gained acceptance over the past few years. Now, we are looking at the emergence of a multi-cloud world where enterprises have a foot in both – private and public clouds, and need to navigate across both these types of cloud environments.
Enterprises are looking at maintaining private clouds for a range of use-cases while integrating public clouds into their strategy because they believe that public clouds are the fastest alternative in terms of time-to-market. With relatively flat IT budgets, they are considering relieving capex pressure by using public clouds. And in some cases, senior leadership mandates a “cloud-first” strategy, both public and private, and IT and business units are figuring out the best way to do that.
What is the best way to do that?
In 2017, I believe companies will be focused on delivering digital workspaces that securely deliver anytime, anywhere access to any application on any device including desktops, smartphones and tablets.
Most enterprise companies are on this digital transformation journey. They understand that the future of business is digital. And so today, more than ever, CIOs’ priorities sound like those of the CEO. In Deloitte’s global 2016-2017 CIO survey, 56% of respondents said that developing their company’s digital capabilities was a core expectation of their businesses and a continued top priority.
Our customers are telling us that they’ll continue to focus on delivering exceptional experiences and using technology to accelerate business agility and innovation. And of course, security will remain top of mind as they’ll always focus on protecting their brand and their customers.
How does that impact you?
VMware customers demand great public and private cloud infrastructure. As an engineer at heart myself, I understand that in order to meet a digital transformation goal, customers need products which can operate through multiple clouds, meet the needs of developers, be inherently secure and be mobile-device friendly.
In turn, our products deliver the following:
A modern data centre and cloud architecture for deploying traditional, cloud-native, and SaaS apps, our integrated architecture supports agility and rapid innovation.
In a world of multiple clouds, where enterprises need to find a way to manage hybrid cloud environments in a holistic way so they’re not surprised by costs or security challenges or other unexpected outcomes, our VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture helps you use ANY CLOUD to deliver ANY APPLICATION to ANY DEVICE.
And by leveraging a ubiquitous software layer, we bring intrinsic security to infrastructure, applications, devices, and end users.
It’s a software-defined approach to business and IT that can accelerate a company’s digital transformation.
So what can we expect from you at Cloud Expo this year?
I will share insights on the technology trends I mentioned earlier and explain how the “State of the Cloud” and advances in software development such as DevOps and Containers are helping to bring these exciting possibilities to reality.
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