Cast your mind back a few years…I can’t have been the only person in the IT industry to have seen VMware as a company on the ropes. The Virtualisation market they’d helped carve out was becoming commoditised; Microsoft’s Hyper-V offering was getting better and was ‘free’, whilst a shift to Cloud and to Linux – especially in the Enterprise, threatened the vSphere cash-cow further.

Meanwhile…attempts to steal a slice of the Application and Desktop Virtualisation market from Citrix with Horizon seemed like a battle VMware couldn’t win. Watching VMware desperately adding vCloud to ELAs (whether the customer had a need for it or not), as AWS and Azure were growing triple-digit percentages YoY organically felt hysterical; indicative of a company without direction, scrambling for relevance.

The Dell acquisition of VMware and the sale of vCloud Air to OVH seemed to validate the thinking of the doubters – The darling of our industry was struggling.

And yet today, I’m writing from the position of suggesting that organisations consider VMware as the keystone vendor of their Software-defined Datacentre (SDDC). I look across the vendors that operate in the space and I don’t see anybody with anything like such a cohesive vision. VMware get it…and you should really be paying attention to what they’ve been up to.

When MBA IT trains its people, we focus on the following areas (as well as the securing of this infrastructure – a conversation for another day!):

Compute
Networking
Storage
Management, Insights and Automation
Business Continuity
Cloud
End User Compute

Consider the list in the context of VMware’s offerings:

Compute – vSphere
Networking – NSX
Storage – vSAN
Management, Insights & Automation – vCenter/vRealize/Airwatch
Business Continuity – Site Recovery Manager
Cloud – VMware Cloud on AWS
End User Compute – Horizon/ThinApp/Airwatch

In 2018, you could theoretically collapse the bulk of your infrastructure into one vendor’s SDDC offerings whilst gaining a simplification of management, depth of insight and agility of Private/Hybrid Cloud + all kinds of other associated benefits including true hardware agnosticism, potential for the streamlining of IT teams, linear and predictable scalability – all with minimal cost to implement, minimal outlay on Training and better commercials.

VMware’s Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) offerings (vSOM, NSX, vSAN) aren’t just a curiosity, I’d argue it’s essential to be evaluating them when planning infrastructure refresh and compelling enough that you just might (with the help of MBA) be able to justify an out-of-cycle upgrade having looked at TCO. vSAN and NSX are doing for storage and networking what ESX did for compute all those years ago and if you don’t know why they’re significant, we’re here to let you know.

Do you have a desire to hear an honest insight into VMware’s Masterplan? Contact presales@mba-it.comor your MBA Account Manager today.

Take things a step further by letting MBA advise on your technological roadmap in the context of your existing VMware utilisation by requesting a VMware Install Base Report (IBR) or engaging with us to complete a VMware Optimisation Assessment (VOA).

All we need from you to progress an engagement is for you to contact your MBA Account Manager or complete this form, sending to presales@mba-it.com.

As VMware Enterprise Partners, MBA are well-positioned to advise on a path of upgrade that suits your unique technical and financial requirements, whilst potentially leveraging new commercial investment and reclaiming of overprovisioned infrastructure to reduce your outlay on existing Support and Maintenance.

We’d love to hear from you, get in touch today!