5 VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Stats You Need To Know

From the number of large deals Tanzu won in the first quarter to the growing number of Tanzu developers, here’s five VMware Tanzu Kubernetes figures you should know about.

5 VMware Tanzu Figures To Know

VMware Tanzu is rapidly gaining market momentum as enterprises and developers across the globe leverage Tanzu’s Kubernetes capabilities to build modern applications faster than ever before.

“Given the importance of application modernization and digital initiatives at all of our customers, you can imagine why Tanzu is becoming more and more central to what we talk about with a lot of our customers,” said VMware’s new CEO Raghu Raghuram during the company’s recent first quarter financial earnings report.

VMware Tanzu enables businesses to run Kubernetes in vSphere and manage Kubernetes across multiple clouds whether its public or private, while allowing customers to automate the delivery of containerized workloads. With roughly 80 million workloads today currently on vSphere platforms in the data center, Tanzu is top of mind in VMware’s strategy to becoming a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and subscription software company.

CRN breaks down five figures and stats around VMware Tanzu Kubernetes in 2021 that channel partners, customers and investors should know.

Tanzu Included In 50% Of Largest Deals

VMware, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtualization and hybrid cloud software superstar, is driving adoption of Tanzu at a break-neck pace for its largest customers. In fact, Tanzu was included in five of VMware’s top ten largest deals in its fiscal 2022 first quarter, which ran from Feb. 1 to April 30.

“In terms of the momentum, [Tanzu] was present in five of our top ten deals,” said VMware’s Raghuram. “Given the importance of application modernization and digital initiatives at all of our customers, you can imagine why Tanzu’s becoming more and more central to what we talk about with a lot of our customers.”

Raghuram said momentum is being driven by Tanzu’s core Kubernetes capabilities, its innovation in management of applications running on Kubernetes, and the tools VMware Tanzu provides for developers who use it to build applications.

One-Third Of Tanzu Business Is Public Cloud Deployments

VMware’s Raghuram disclosed that “at least” one-third of Tanzu deployments in 2020 were on public clouds.

Raghuram said customers’ top priority today is to accelerate their digital transformation, which typically means modernizing their application portfolio and creating a multi-cloud environment.

“You have to help customers build modern applications faster on the cloud of their choice, and that is Tanzu. Tanzu today, 30 percent -- at least one-third of the Tanzu business -- are deployments on public clouds,” said Raghuram. “They are moving to one or more clouds, as it turns out, and they‘re increasingly deploying applications in the data center at the edge. It is this distributed enterprise architecture that’s taking shape. In order to help customers accelerate this, you have to solve multiple problems and that’s what our software platform does.”

Millions Of Tanzu Developers

Tanzu is enabling its customers’ developers to modernize their applications in the clouds of their choice via innovative software tools and the VMware Tanzu Developer Center. VMware’s center provides tools for DevOps engineers, automation experts and developers.

Spring, for example, is one of the world’s most popular frameworks that enterprises leverage for writing high performing and testable Java code that can be used on top of Tanzu Kubernetes.

“Spring [is] very popular in enterprises. We have over five million developers that are registered developers of Spring. And Spring Boot [a developer training course], which is the technology Spring developers used to modernize apps, we are seeing 32 starts of Spring Boot applications every minute,” said Raghuram. “And that‘s an amazing number.”

Additionally, in terms of VMware’s Bitnami open-source application marketplace, VMware has more than two million developers registered.

“So we have quietly built quite a significant population of developers that are using Tanzu technologies to modernize their applications,” VMware’s CEO said.

Tanzu Helps Push SaaS And Subscription Sales To 25 Percent Of Total Revenue

VMware is shifting away from its traditional enterprise software license agreements in favor of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and subscription sales motion. The company has been successfully making SaaS and subscription sales a larger part of VMware’s total revenue over the past few years.

SaaS and subscription revenue jumped nearly 30 percent year over year in VMware’s first quarter reaching $741 million. For the first time in VMware’s history, SaaS and subscription sales accounted for 25 percent of VMware’s $3 billion in total revenue during its first quarter.

VMware’s SaaS and subscription offerings include its modern application business of Tanzu and Pivotal, along with offerings like Carbon Black, Cloud Health Technologies, VeloCloud and VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as a portion of its End User Computing business.

Huge Tanzu Win With The U.S. Army

Last month, the U.S. Army Futures Command, in collaboration with VMware, announced that it is building a software factory in Texas based on Tanzu.

The goal is for Tanzu to enable the U.S. Army to create a top-notch software company inside the Army that will employ civilians and soldiers recruited from posts around the world. The Army expects to increase the rate at which software can be built by embracing DevOps best practices to build cloud-native applications in collaboration with experts from VMware Tanzu Labs.

“VMware Tanzu has been selected by U.S. Army Futures Command to enable a software factory where they can use modern cloud-native development practices,” Zane Rowe, VMware’s chief financial officer and former interim CEO, said recently.

Other government agencies working with VMware Tanzu Labs to modernize app development and deployment include the U.S. Space Force. VMware also recently secured a huge Tanzu deal this year with Telecom Italia, where VMware Tanzu is helping the telecommunications giant deliver a better digital experience and modernize their operating infrastructure.