VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger’s 5 Boldest Statements At VMWorld

‘With Project Pacific, we are bringing the largest infrastructure community, the largest set of operators, the largest set of customers directly to the Kubernetes. We will be the leading enabler of Kubernetes,’ says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

Pat Gelsinger On Kubernetes, Acquisitions And Bitcoin

More than 20,000 VMware customers, partners and employees flocked to San Francisco this week for VMWorld 2019, where the virtualization superstar unleashed a slew of new offerings.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger gave a bullish keynote on Monday in front of tens-of-thousands around the company’s recent acquisitions of Pivotal Software and Carbon Black, as well as new Kubernetes solutions.

“With Project Pacific, we are bringing the largest infrastructure community, the largest set of operators, the largest set of customers directly to the Kubernetes,” said Gelsinger. “We will be the leading enabler of Kubernetes.”

Additionally, VMware’s CEO addressed how technology is sometimes negatively being leveraged. “Ninety-five-plus percent of [Bitcoin] uses are illicit and criminal. It is a climate crisis consuming almost a household of energy for every single entry. Bitcoin today is not okay,” said Gelsinger.

Here are the five boldest remarks from VMware’s CEO during his keynote at VMWorld 2019.

Welcoming Pivotal Software And Carbon Black To VMware

Gelsinger pumped the crowd up in the beginning of his keynote to recognize VMware’s blockbuster plans to acquire DevOps specialist Pivotal Software and cybersecurity endpoint leader Carbon Black.

“We’re expanding this community and this family. It is my joy, privilege and honor to welcome [Pivotal CEO] Rob Mee and all the Pivotal team to the VMware family. We’ve been working together for years, we see amazing synergies. It’s also my incredible honor to welcome Carbon Black to the VMware family. Patrick [Morley] is the CEO of an amazing cybersecurity company headquartered in Boston doing amazing work. We’re thrilled to talk to you about how we’re bringing together their technology with ours to give the advantage to you, our customers and partners. … We’re thrilled to have Pivotal coming into VMware – the most popular Java framework available today. Pivotal Spring Boot is downloaded 75,000,000-plus million times per month.

New VMware Tanzu ‘To Transform The Way Enterprise Build Software For Kubernetes’

“Kubernetes has emerged as this ubiquitous infrastructure that can connect developers and IT operations. Since Java, the virtual machine or the cloud, we haven’t seen the technology as critical as Kubernetes. And Kubernetes is achieving industry consensus and energy as the platform that will connect these two worlds – developers and IT operators. Some think about Kubernetes as container orchestration, but we believe it is much much more. Our own Joe Beda (co-founder of Kubernetes and Heptio, which VMware acquired) said, it’s more like improvisational Jazz. When something unexpected happens, the rest of the players adapt. To lay our strategy in the area of Kubernetes, I’m going to get some help from a Kubernetes celebrity, one of the founders and creators of Kubernetes – and now a principal engineer at VMware – Joe Beda. He is much more than just a leader in this community, he was the first committer to Kubernetes. … I am thrilled to be introducing VMware Tanzu. VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of product and services to transform the way enterprises build software for Kubernetes. Tanzu [means] for a new branch of innovation or it’s container designed for portability. It just works. With Tanzu, we’re going to be building, running and managing applications and we have exciting announcements in all of these three areas.”

Project Pacific ‘Unites vSphere And Kubernetes’

“The idea is that you have to be able to run Kubernetes with consistency across all these different environments. Today, we’re addressing that with VMware PKS, but if we’re really serious about Kubernetes – what would we do? How about building it into vSphere? That’s exactly what we are doing. I’m exciting to announce Project Pacific, an effort to embed Kubernetes directly into vSphere. Project Pacific unites vSphere and Kubernetes and unites developers and operators. Project Pacific established vSphere as the platform for modern applications. vSphere – the most trusted platform today and the most trusted platform tomorrow. That’s what we’re bringing to market. We’re building Kubernetes deep into vSphere and along the way we’re making vSphere a much better place to run Kubernetes on vSphere. Operation teams will have one platform where they can manage all of their resources including virtual machines and Kubernetes resources, then application teams will get a self-service experience built on the proven Kubernetes API. … With Project Pacific, we are bringing the largest infrastructure community, the largest set of operators, the largest set of customers directly to the Kubernetes. We will be the leading enabler of Kubernetes.

5G: ‘The Biggest Capital Investment Build-Out For The Rest Of Our Careers’

5G is maybe the biggest capital investment build-out for the rest of our careers. Telcos will play a bigger role in the cloud universe than ever before. But they’re also changing their underlying infrastructure [from] a hardware-centric vertical silo, like we built data centers 20 years ago, to now it’s becoming a software-layer across multiple generations of technology. The shift from hardware to software, we believe it’s a great opportunity for U.S. industry to step back in and play a critical role in 5G. We’re also thrilled to acquire Uhana – a powerful AI to optimize telco networks. … We’re thrilled to have them as part of our team to help bring our innovations into the Telco network and world.

Bitcoin ‘Is Bad’ For Blockchain

“As technologists, we have to acknowledge that often the innovations and breakthroughs we do can be used in unanticipated ways. … We’ve brought together communities for more relationships online, then all of a sudden, we realized that we’ve created platforms for mass disinformation at scale. Then Blockchain, this idea of distributing a unit of trust – is it good or bad? It’s given way to Bitcoin, which I will argue is bad. Ninety-five plus percent of its uses are illicit and criminal. It is a climate crisis consuming almost a household of energy for every single entry. Bitcoin today is not okay, but the underlying technology is extremely powerful and Blockchain and distributed ledger is not the problem. We at VMware created an enterprise distributed ledger – good for the environment and suitable for enterprise purposes.