Since introducing its digital-foundation concept at VMworld last year, VMware continues to further is vision for the customer and partner cloud journey. That strategy is evident in today’s news around realizing the value of VMware Cloud for consistent infrastructure and operations. 

VMware on Tuesday announced updates to its Cloud Foundation, vCloud Director, and CloudHealth by VMware, and broader access to Cloud Foundation services via new VMware Cloud on AWS regions in Canada, Paris, Singapore, and additional VMware Cloud Verified partners worldwide. 

VMware’s Ajay Patel

“Our strategy is built around looking at our customer’s needs and their application workloads and identifying and helping them figure out where best to run their applications,” Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit at VMware, said on a call. “We’ve always said, it’s no longer just about hybrid as a destination but more often an operating model. And, our view of the market is the journey for these customers is a multicloud journey.” 

A deeper dive into today’s announcements: 

“We’re seeing as much as 60 percent efficiency in customers who deploy these integrated, highly automated, integrated appliances,” said Patel. 

The solution is also optimized for performance, scalability, user experience and total cost of ownership savings, the company said.

With this release, VMware will deliver VMware Horizon 7 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Cloud Foundation accelerates the delivery of Horizon 7 benefits by providing complete infrastructure automation for Horizon 7 environments including the installation of Horizon 7, App Volumes, User Environment Manager and Unified Access Gateway.  

More than 60 VMware partners are building or delivering managed services for VMware Cloud on AWS and more than 280 partners have achieved the VMware Cloud on AWS Solution competency since the VMware Cloud on AWS partner program launched less than one year ago. Additionally, VMware has 35 VMware Cloud Provider Program partners that have achieved Cloud Verified status. These partners offer a complete VMware SDDC as a service and value-added services and support from their data centers via Cloud Foundation. 

“We provide a SaaS-delivered platform, allowing customers to have a single place where they manage their multicloud portfolio, that not only integrates with clouds such as Amazon, Google and Azure but integrates with all the tools that customers use to help support their management and business services in the cloud,” said Joe Kinsella, vice president and chief technology officer, CloudHealth by VMware, and developer of CloudHealth, a next generation cloud management platform. 

Expect to see upcoming changes such as enhanced amortization, convertible Reserved Instance (RI) exchanger automation, container cluster visibility, and cross-family rightsizing for Amazon EC2.