4.0 IS THE CONVERGENCE OF ALL TECH SUPERPOWERS

Chris Wolf, Vice President and CTO, Global Field & Industry, VMware, talks about a host of issues including their cloud journey, the rising power of Kubernetes, the promise of 5G and what Industry 4.0 means for the tech industry.

- Sunil Rajguru

The cloud journey

We started on this journey about six years ago. We were connecting and working with organisations that were operating in two or more clouds for two or more years. That was kind of our criteria. We asked them: What are the problems you want us to solve? They turned out to be cost management, network, security and policy enforcement. They were trying to go cloud by cloud and to figure these things out on their own. It was very difficult to manage and scale. Our approach is to say, every cloud has unique intrinsic value. Every cloud is adding new capabilities on a daily basis. You’re never going to be able to do everything across all cloud. So you pick the things or the problems that customers want solved. You focus on that.

The hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud is about having a consistent infrastructure and operational model anywhere you would want to run applications. We have the same infrastructure, same management, same tools, same processes for our applications, whether it’s in an AWS data center or out an Edge site or anything in between. From an integration perspective, if I land an application in AWS and I want to hook that application into AWS Lambda, or Amazon RDS or any other services, you can do that. You have a lot of flexibility in how you compartmentalize different parts of the application stack. Note very customer and every application is going to land on the VMware fabric.

SMEs and their challenges