VMware reaffirms commitment to Tanzu

VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram has reaffirmed the company’s commitment to its Tanzu portfolio, despite some uncertainty about the future of the cloud-native application platform among customers and industry observers.

Speaking to local media on the sidelines of the VMware Explore 2023 Singapore conference, Raghuram said Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom, which expects to close its $61bn acquisition of VMware later this month, has been very clear about the need to continue investing in VMware’s multicloud strategy underpinned by Tanzu.

Raghuram stressed the significance of having an infrastructure stack that can support applications, and Tanzu plays a crucial role in this regard. “This is very much part of the thesis that [Tan] has about multicloud and we expect that to continue,” he said.

In August 2023, VMware reorganised the Tanzu portfolio by integrating the IT automation, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), and FinOps capabilities of VMware Aria. It also introduced new capabilities such as the Tanzu Application Engine, which helps platform engineering teams incorporate developer requirements when provisioning infrastructure.

Raghuram said the decision to integrate Aria capabilities into Tanzu had been in the works for over a year, noting that Aria was primarily focused on easing infrastructure management, an area that has become mature.

“The thing that customers want the most help with is the management of applications, so what we want to do eventually with Tanzu is to help customers with building and running the application to managing all aspects of the application,” he said.

“Building the application was where we started with Tanzu, while the Tanzu Application Platform is all about running the application. And Tanzu Intelligence, as we call it, brings in some important Aria components that are relevant for managing applications to provide a full solution,” Raghuram added.

Colin Yip, head of infocomm technology and data at PSA Singapore, said VMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation had enabled the port operator to keep pace with changing customer needs when it started to revamp its mission-critical applications five years ago.

“We were very cognisant of the fact that we couldn’t do things the same way we did before,” Yip said during the conference. “We anticipate a future when an application is not something you deliver and run for five years, but something that needs constant change.”

That prompted PSA to look for a platform that would enable it to simplify its technology stack, allowing its developers to focus on solving business problems and not IT problems. Yip said Pivotal Cloud Foundry, or Tanzu Application Service following VMware’s acquisition of Pivotal, fitted the bill.

“Today, we are running many more applications on this platform, which gives our teams a consistent and quick way to get up and running at a time when it is difficult to know what exactly customers want, which may be different the next day. I think it has helped us speed up our ability to innovate quickly.”