VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger's Keynote: 5 Boldest Statements At VMworld

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger speaks about 'deep and intimate' AWS integration ahead, the acquisition of CloudHealth Technologies, and VMware's hybrid cloud strategy during his keynote at VMworld 2018.

Pat Gelsinger Takes Center Stage

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger was on fire during his keynote at VMworld 2018 Monday, touching on a slew of new products and strategies as well as brandishing his long-term commitment to the company by getting a “VMware” tattoo.

"What can I do to take my commitment to the next level? I went down the street to 'Bad-Ass Tattoo,'" said Gelsinger, before showing off a VMware tattoo on his forearm to 20,000 customers, partners and executives in Las Vegas Monday. "So it's time for all of us to take our commitment up a level. Sometimes what happens in Vegas, you take home," said Gelsinger, whom CRN named at the No. 1 most influential executive of 2018 earlier this month in our annual Top 100 Executives report.

Here are the five boldest statements from Gelsinger around VMware's acquisition of CloudHealth Technologies, NSX, hybrid cloud, and a deeper partnership with AWS ahead.

'Deep And Intimate' AWS Integration Ahead

[Our] deep integrations have really been the thing that we're committed to. We have large innovation teams that are working literally every day on bringing together [technologies] and how do we fuse these platforms together in deep and intimate ways so we can deliver new services just like Elastic DRS and vSAN – really powerful capabilities. And that pace of innovation continues. We're continuing this forward pace of innovation, completing all the capabilities of NSX with full integration with all of [AWS] Direct Connect capabilities, improving licensing capabilities on the platform. … We're continuing this pace of innovation going forward.

CloudHealth Technologies Acquisition, VMware Offerings Coming Soon

We're seeing in our customers that a new role is emerging, the cloud operations role. The person who is figuring out how to make these multi-cloud environments work and keep track of who's using what and which data is landing where. Today, I'm thrilled to tell you that VMWare is acquiring the leader in this space, CloudHealth Technologies. CloudHealth Technologies supports Amazon, Azure and Google. It has 3,500 customers, some of the largest and most respected brands in the As-a-Service industry and SaaS business today. We will take CloudHealth and we're going to make it a fundamental platform and branded offering from VMware. We're adding many of the other VMware components into this platform, such as WaveFront analytics, our cloud compliance, and many of the other VMware products will become part of the CloudHealth suite of services. We will be enabling that through our enterprise channels as well as through our MSPs and VMware Cloud Provider Program partners as well. Simply put, we will make CloudHealth the cloud operations platform of choice for the industry.

'Enormous' Telecommunications Opportunity With 5G

As we think about this cloud topic, we see it as a multi-cloud world -- hybrid cloud, public cloud -- but increasingly seeing edge and telco becoming clouds on their own. This area of telco to me is an enormous opportunity for us and our community. Data centers and cloud today are over 80 percent virtualized. The telco network is less than 10 percent virtualized. Wow! An industry that is almost as big as our industry, entirely un-virtualized. All of the technologies we've created here can be applied over here in telco and we have an enormous build-out coming – the 5G environments emerging. What an opportunity for us.

Rule Of Cloud: 'Ruthlessly Automate Everything'

The hybrid cloud is the public cloud and private cloud cooperating with a consistent infrastructure and consistent operations. Simply put, a seamless path to and from the cloud that my workloads don't care if it's here or there. I'm able to run in a scalable, flexible, agile manner across those two environments whether it's my data center or someone else's, I can bring them together. To make that work is the magic of the VMware Cloud Foundation. VMware Cloud Foundation brings together compute, vSphere – the core of why we are here – but combines that with networking, storage, delivered through a layer of management and automation. The rule of the cloud is, ruthlessly automate everything. … VMware Cloud Foundation provides this consistent infrastructure and operations with integrated life-cycle management, automation patching – VMware Cloud Foundation is the simplest path to the hybrid cloud and the fastest way to get there.

SD-WAN 'Hottest Product' In VMware Portfolio

When we think about the network, we are just so excited with what we have done and what we're seeing in the industry. We've gotten a lot done over the last five years in networking. Look at these numbers: Eighty million switch ports have been shipped. We are now 10X larger and No. 2 in SDN. We have over 7,500 customers running on NSX. Eighty-two percent of the Fortune 100 has now adopted NSX. You have made NSX the standard in software-defined networking. … We acquired SD-WAN, VeloCloud – that's the hottest product in VMware's portfolio today. It's the opportunity to fundamentally transform branch and wide-area networking, and we're extending it to the edge.