Interview | JYou Baguley, cto EMEA VMware
Under the wings of Broadcom, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) has become the flagship of the virtualization emperor. ‘All products we develop must serve VCF. This makes the dream we had in 2011 come true: one integrated platform. That’s why I stayed with VMware,” said Joe Baguley, CTO EMEA at the company.
Computable speaks to Baguley during Explore 2024 in Barcelona in early November. He has been playing his role as CTO for EMEA for almost fourteen years. He has experienced the ownership changes of VMware (founded in 1998): EMC (in 2004), Dell (when it acquired EMC in 2015) and Broadcom (November 2023). ‘I could have left last year, plenty of offers, but I stayed because I saw that the vision from 2011 will come true.’
He refers to a meeting in Monterey (California) of the internal R&D group where the term ‘software defined datacenter‘ was coined. Raghu Raghuram, Kit Colbert and Steve Herrod – the men who shaped VMware almost from the start – discussed in Monterey how virtualization could further develop. Ultimately towards a clear platform for a private cloud, independent of the hardware. ‘I now have the feeling that who will make that vision come true. That in two or three years I can sit back and say: we succeeded, the private cloud is here.’
After that meeting in Monterey, VMware evolved with separate product lines for compute, storage and networking. How did that go?
Baguley: “We came up from the virtualization company that made the hypervisor suitable for the x86 architecture and on top of that we started virtualized networks when we acquired Nicira – which became NSX. Then we had VSan, which was virtualized storage. And then we also had the hypervisor automation toolsets somewhere when we acquired Dynamic Ops which eventually became Aria (multi-cloud management solution) and VRealize suite and so on. Those were the three components. There was a division that did VMware Cloud Foundation and tried to merge those different business units. But that didn’t work; they all had their own road map. The problem was that the roadmap for these products, NSX, VSan, ESX and automation, was not driven by VCF. They were driven by their own plans for different things. We had the silos that our customers also have. When Broadcom acquired us, we transitioned to one business unit that provides VCF. Below that are the components of VCF, but they are not separated. And now the roadmap for those components is driven by VCF as a product. So now if you work for VCF, you work in ESX, you don’t get to make any decisions about where your product goes unless it’s aligned with VCF. You are told that you are doing this because VCF needs it. NSX is told you are doing this because VCF needs it, which is a reversal. It’s a complete reversal.’
Baguley sees VCF ensuring safe and responsible data processing everywhere
He continues: “We can now talk about advanced cloud services, because for me that was always the piece we were missing to be a public cloud. You know? We went to a public cloud and had no database. We had no database services. We didn’t have security services that you could just check and connect. And now with VCF we’re making it so easy to add these components so you can really say we’re competing with the public cloud in terms of capabilities and features. Broadcom gave us that focus.”
Baguley can now urge its customers to move away from their silos (compute, storage, network) because VMware has done so itself. Baguley: ‘I see public cloud adoption slowing down because of the three C’s that our CEO Hock Tan talked about: cost, complexity in compliance. For these reasons, we see that organizations want a private cloud, with private data. Many customers have opted for ‘cloud first’. Three years ago they determined that fifty percent of workloads should be in the public cloud. When I now ask how things are going, they have not gotten further than five percent. But in the meantime they have neglected the infrastructure in their own data centers, because they would have to process much less.’
Law of Baguley
‘The conversations we are having with our customers now are: how do I build a private cloud that is as good as, if not better than, a public cloud? What should I do? And our answer is very simple. The technology works. The problems our customers have are usually related to people and processes.’ And here he comes up with Baguley’s Law: ‘Any conversation about technology, if it goes on long enough, turns into a conversation about people and processes.’ According to him, it is not about buying the next ‘shiny element’ for the automation platform, such as artificial intelligence, but about the question of how to get a private cloud operational. ‘There are five thousand people at this event. They are all learning how to get a private cloud up and running and how to operate it.’
And then organizations should also take a good look at what they already have before purchasing something new, he believes. ‘There are companies that have a virtualization platform and a containerization platform, while it is possible to run a virtual machine and a container side by side on our platform. That has been possible for seven years, but they don’t know it. And that’s why they spend too much money.’
Floating cloud
With VCF it is possible to have a private cloud that also extends over the public cloud of, for example, Microsoft. ‘But it doesn’t run under Azure, because you have no influence on that. Everything runs under our operating system; directly on bare metal from the public cloud providers.’ Baguley sees VCF ensuring safe and responsible data processing everywhere. In the local data center, in the public cloud, at the edge (this will happen more often, according to Baguley), even in a soldier’s backpack.
He shows a video of how weapons manufacturer BAE Systems uses VCF. BAE has built a ship on a hill in the south of England to test all the technology before the ships are launched. BAE Systems has developed a secure cloud infrastructure at its Maritime Integration & Support Centre, a facility that replicates the IT systems installed on board ships in the UK military fleet, using virtualization software from VMware. ‘The ships are actually a floating cloud, although they are not connected to the internet. There is a cloud infrastructure on board the naval ships, but it is completely disconnected from the internet. It must run standalone and can deal with all kinds of problems that arise on board.’
VMware makes it possible to redirect traffic to a machine that works if something breaks, because it is a software-defined platform. That saves time and money.
