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WATCH: VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger Talks SD-WAN Momentum

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger is feeling good about the company’s future in networking.

“You know VMware vSAN, VxRail are clearly becoming the standard for how hyperconverged is done,” he said during VMWorld 2018 in Las Vegas, while pointing to figures that show 82 percent of the Fortune 100 has now adopted NSX, VMware’s network virtualization and security platform.

[Related: WATCH: VMWorld 2018 Day One Recap]

On Monday, the company unveiled a new version of NSX, extending multi-cloud networking and security capabilities to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and on-premises environments. VMware’s Tom Gillis, SVP of Networking and Security, says the enhancements push to make it easier to use and deploy more broadly. The next step is to add even more intelligence and automation.

"I'd love a world one day where the only thing you heard from VMware is Cloud Foundation" https://t.co/M646msGCO4 #VMworld pic.twitter.com/Txh7wrbM4A

— VMworld (@VMworld) August 28, 2018

Solution provider David Klee, founder and chief architect at Nebraska-based HeraFlux Technologies, looked positively on the news, telling CRNtv it all comes down to security for him.

“Networking has been historically fragmented,” he said. “So, if you can turn it around…lock it down better, make it more streamlined and more automated, especially around NSX, then we can be closer to a more secure environment.”

VMware Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Poonen says the company’s investments in SD-WAN will have a big impact on the bottom line. In December 2017, VMware acquired SD-WAN cloud provider VeloCloud, which Gelsinger referred to as the company’s “hottest product” at the show.

“The networking opportunity has been very heavily hardware,” said Poonen. He referred to a chat that shows about 30-35 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.

For more of CRNtv’s coverage, watch the above video.