Virtualization News

VMware’s Acquisition Of VeloCloud Is Paying Off

VeloCloud is quickly becoming a key element of VMware’s edge strategy with CEO Pat Gelsinger describing it as the hottest element of the company’s product portfolio. And partners seem to agree.

“The purchase of VeloCloud was a great move on their part because SD-WAN is just going to become so much more important in a hybrid cloud world,” said Mark Vaughn, Director of Presidio’s Strategic Technology Group.

Presidio is an IT solutions provider focused on digital infrastructure, cloud and security with corporate headquarters in New York. VMware acquired VeloCloud, a provider of cloud-delivered SD-WAN in December 2017.

“As your workloads make it closer to the cloud but further from the consumer and the employee, you’re going to need that WAN optimization and the security piece that you get with NSX,” he added.

At VMWorld 2018, VMware announced a new initiative using VeloCloud technology, called Project Dimension. It will combine VMware Cloud Foundation, in a hyper-converged form factor, with a cloud control plane to deliver a software-defined data center infrastructure as an end-to-end service, operated by VMware. VeloCloud will enable systems deployed in edge locations to be connected to other parts of a company’s infrastructure.

“It almost feels like the early days of virtualization,” Gelsinger said of SD-WAN. VMware Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Poonen adds that the company’s investments in SD-WAN will have a big impact on the bottom line.

“The networking opportunity has been very heavily hardware,” said Poonen. He referred to a chat that shows about 30 to 35 percent of network cost has been hardware, another 5 percent software and then a lot of labor. “We’re changing the economics of that fundamentally,” he added, explaining that software-defined WANS will enable organizations to restructure the way they operate their networks.

Other big announcements at VMWorld 2018 center on VMware’s partnership with Amazon. The newly announced offering, Amazon RDS on VMware, will make it as easy to set up, operate and scale databases on-premises and in hybrid environments as it is in AWS.

“We’re really creating a true hybrid cloud that we’ve been looking for,” added Vaughn, who says VMware is making all the right moves in building a true cloud-native environment. “Instead of making two technologies work together they have found a way with VMware Cloud on AWS and partnering with Amazon to actually make a single service that runs on two different places,” he said. “So there’s no longer translating workloads from one type to another.”

Vaughn’s comments are featured in CRNtv’s “Partner Perspective” series. Watch the video included in this article for more of his interview.