PRESS RELEASE — BARCELONA, SPAIN–(Marketwired – October 13, 2015) –

Today at VMworld® 2015 Europe, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced major updates to its hybrid cloud management platform in the form of VMware vRealize® Automation™ 7 and VMware vRealize Business™ Standard 7 to further empower IT teams to enable digital business transformation within their organizations. These new product releases, in combination with the delivery of VMware vRealize Operations™ 6.1 and VMware vRealize Log Insight™ 3 in Q3 2015, represent a complete refresh of VMware’s industry-leading hybrid cloud management platform.

Software is transforming every industry as businesses differentiate themselves and compete more effectively with the help of applications and services that deliver innovative customer experiences. This digital business transformation presents an opportunity for CIOs and IT teams to help their organizations become more agile, to build and deliver both traditional and cloud-native applications more rapidly, and drive down costs without sacrificing governance. Today’s updates to VMware’s cloud management platform will further enable IT teams to accelerate digital business transformation initiatives through new and improved capabilities for delivering applications into production more rapidly along with increased transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services across the hybrid cloud.

“IT is under constant pressure to help get applications into production faster, and to drive down costs without sacrificing governance,” said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Management Suite Business Unit, VMware. “VMware’s hybrid cloud management platform is uniquely positioned to help IT organizations navigate the choppy waters of the digital business transformation. Today’s updates will further help IT to deliver service agility across the public and private cloud while achieving service cost benefits. Our cloud management platform advancements in the second half of 2015 are another big step toward delivering on our vision of a next-generation, platform that is application-aware and self-optimizing.”

VMware Refreshes Cloud Management Platform with Automation and Business Solutions Updates

VMware’s cloud management platform combines the capabilities of its cloud automation, cloud operations and cloud business management solutions into a single integrated solution. It delivers a comprehensive management stack for the software-defined data center that enables IT to deliver unified services at the speed of business, but with the control and cost efficiency that IT requires. The integration between the platform and VMware infrastructure and services helps customers to more easily adopt a software-defined data center architecture.

Today, VMware is evolving its cloud management platform with new and improved updates including:

A major product release, VMware vRealize Automation 7 introduces …

… unified service blueprint capabilities that will enable IT and DevOps teams to simplify and accelerate the delivery of integrated multi-tier applications with application-centric networking and security across clouds.
New unified service blueprints will enable the modeling of infrastructure, networks, security, applications and custom IT services including their relationships and dependencies within a graphical canvas. This latest release is integrated with VMware NSX® 6.2 to dynamically configure networks and micro-segmentation unique to each application modeled in the blueprint designer. VMware vRealize Automation 7 blueprints will span the hybrid cloud featuring out-of-the box support for VMware vCloud® Air™ and Amazon Web Services (AWS), including new support for VMware vCloud Government Service™ and AWS GovCloud, OpenStack Kilo, and VMware vSphere® 6 Update 1. The unified service blueprints will be accessible through APIs or CLIs as code for textual and human readable authoring of blueprints by DevOps teams.

This new release will also greatly enhance extensibility through an Event Broker, which will allow new functionality without changing core code to preserve upgradability. It will also feature simplified consumer APIs for requesting and managing services. Now featuring integration with VMware Identity Manager™, VMware vRealize Automation 7 will offer enhanced identity services including multi-factor authentication, SmartCard support, the ability to integrate with federated external authorization services, and more. Additionally, VMware vRealize Automation 7 will introduce a dramatically consolidated architecture with simplified installation that will reduce deployment time by up to 37 percent for most configurations (compared to the previous release) to help IT organizations accelerate time to value. ⁽¹⁾

VMware vRealize Automation significantly accelerates application deployment, resulting in improved productivity, the ability to deliver new application functionality faster, and a reduction in costs, according to a Forrester Research Total Economic Impact study published in June 2015. ⁽²⁾The study noted that VMware vRealize Automation customers achieved the following benefits:

VMware vRealize Business Standard 7 introduces several new and enhanced capabilities to provide IT teams with increased transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services. The release features new costing and pricing policies for private and public clouds including VMware vCloud Air, AWS, and all other clouds supported by vRealize Automation. VMware vRealize Business Standard 7 also supports …

… Microsoft Azure for easy, comprehensive private and public cloud cost comparisons. The enhanced showback capabilities of this new release will enable IT to provide fine-grained cost reporting to the Line of Business including showback across private and public clouds, a clear month-to-date and monthly cost projection analysis, and costs grouped by business service to provide business context. New planning and cost optimization capabilities will visualize costs of used and remaining capacity by data center, will allow modeling of new workloads, and analyze the impact on the remaining capacity or costs as well as quantify potential savings from reclamation opportunities.

Supporting Quotes

“By the end of 2015, IDC expects over 65 percent of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud architectures that encompass a mix of private cloud, public cloud services and/or non-cloud physical and virtual resources,” said Mary Johnston Turner, Research VP, Enterprise Systems Management Software, IDC. “Modern cloud native applications are being deployed and updated with increasing frequency and driving up computing demands on backend conventional systems. VMware’s comprehensive updates to its cloud management platform enables a new level of automation, security and cost optimization to help customers more effectively manage these complex environments.”

“Agility is key to Symantec’s ability to accelerate innovation and lead the cybersecurity industry forward,” said Chandra Ranganathan, senior director, IT Infrastructure Services, Symantec. “By adopting a software-defined data center architecture, Symantec IT has automated service delivery to our business units, streamlining provisioning times from months or weeks to days or hours. VMware vRealize Automation 7’s new unified blueprint capabilities, drag and drop service design canvas, and simplified installation represent a significant advance in IT’s ability to meet the demands of the business at the speed of the business.”

Pricing and Availability

VMware vRealize Automation 7 and VMware vRealize Business 7 Standard are both expected to become available in Q4 2015.

Additional Resources

Also today at VMworld® 2015 Europe, VMware, Inc. announced enhancements to the company’s unified hybrid cloud platform that will accelerate application development, delivery and deployment, while also providing deeper insights into customers’ hybrid cloud deployments.

“Enterprises are looking to move their applications to the cloud, and increasingly see a hybrid strategy to cloud adoption as the right answer,” said Bill Fathers, executive vice president and general manager, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware. “VMware’s approach is about empowering organizations to securely build, run and deliver any application across any environment. Our public cloud, vCloud Air, and global service provider ecosystem, vCloud Air Network, form the core components of our Unified Hybrid Cloud and remove that compromise from consideration.”

VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform enables customers to create one consistent environment based on VMware vSphere across the private and public cloud to securely build, run and deliver any traditional or cloud-native application. VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform is built on a software-defined data center architecture, and offers customers openness and choice in how to build and manage applications and cloud environments based on their needs.

New Updates for VMware vCloud Air and VMware vCloud Air Network

As part of today’s announcements, VMware introduced new updates to VMware vCloud Air and VMware vCloud Air Network. New or expanded offerings include:

… Service Providers in the VMware vCloud Air Network to build differentiated cloud services that are hybrid-aware and ideal for enterprise-class organizations. VMware vCloud Director enables service providers with tools to deliver robust and secure self-service cloud orchestration capabilities to their end customers.

Among the enhancements of this release include support for vSphere 6 and VMware NSX® 6.1.4, the addition of organization Virtual Data Center (vDC) templates, VMware vSphere vApp™ enhancements and OAuth Support for Identity Sources. These new additions help Service Providers drive operational efficiency and provide new capabilities for customers. Learn more about VMware vCloud Director here.

The Advantages to VMware’s Approach to the Public Cloud

Organizations are moving to a hybrid IT environment using VMware’s public cloud, vCloud Air, as well as VMware vCloud Air Network, an ecosystem of over 4,000 service providers located in more than 100 countries …

… offering VMware-based cloud services. VMware vCloud Air is a public cloud that enables organizations to quickly and safely take advantage of the public cloud benefits, with a consistent experience for IT and developers. Application processes and time-to-value are streamlined with VMware vCloud Air while security and performance are maintained.

VMware vCloud Air Network, a global network of validated cloud services based on VMware technologies, enables data sovereignty while providing a wide range of cloud services and vertical market expertise. The network provides specialized compliance and certifications from small-to-medium businesses to Fortune 500s. Both VMware vCloud Air and VMware vCloud Air Network help organizations address the risks and uncertainties of commodity public clouds and incompatible hybrid clouds with robust and secure, infrastructure services.

Analyst, Customer and Partner Perspectives

VMware vCloud Air

“Hybrid clouds enable enterprise IT and developers to leverage public cloud’s speed and agility with existing on-premises tools, systems and policies. With the move to the cloud, CIOs and IT executives are looking to simplify operations, make infrastructure decisions that can scale to demand and deliver a solid return on investment. VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform helps businesses remain competitive through this transformative IT period.” – Melanie Posey, Research Vice President, Hosting & Managed Network Services, IDC

“The number of websites we run is vast. When our websites are down, we’re losing money every single minute. Choosing VMware vCloud Air, it was a fairly straightforward choice after looking at the numbers. It was the automation, replication that we knew was happening in a specified time period that made it a simple choice for us.” – Schalk Van der Merwe, CIO, The Hut Group

“New College Durham offers a broad range of courses to a mixed student base, comprised of part-time and full-time students, so this requires a flexible IT function to support our heterogeneous learning environment. Our complex structure put sustained pressure on our IT team to multitask across the full spectrum of tasks. We wanted a solution which could be operated using the same tools and skills that our IT team was used to. VMware vCloud Air offered this, and it also provided the added benefit of being underpinned by comprehensive and fair service level agreements — meaning the college felt safe that the solution would be able to deliver exactly what it had promised.” – George Wraith, Head of ICT, New College Durham

VMware vCloud Air Network

“A hybrid cloud approach offers a real and long term solution to …

… the challenges faced by many IT teams who have a varied estate and a wide range of applications on which their business depends to support. Claranet offers our customers the flexibility to select the appropriate cloud infrastructure solution and the ability to secure and control high-performance delivery of workloads. As a partner in the VMware vCloud Air Network, Claranet helps enterprises leverage their existing VMware implementations in combination with Claranet’s hosting capabilities to support their cloud computing objectives. Working closely with VMware, we enable our customer’s IT teams to focus on the applications and data their organizations need to grow.” – Neil Thomas, Product and Marketing Director, Claranet Limited

“The VMware vCloud Air Network helps OVH deliver enhanced hybrid cloud solutions to our global customers. The network gives us access to expert resources that enable businesses to take the optimal steps in their managed cloud journey. Our customers can rely on us to provide robust, highly available and secure services so they can focus on their business.” – Laurent Allard, CEO, OVH

“European enterprises of all sizes are transforming their existing traditional IT into a state-of-the-art, highly flexible IT infrastructure. T-Systems as part of Deutsche Telekom Group, has developed a hybrid cloud portfolio of products based upon VMware technology. This hybrid infrastructure as a service offering helps address the European market needs and helps customers maintain control of an internally managed cloud while relying on an external private or public cloud as needed. This approach enables organizations to seamlessly extend their existing on-premises VMware infrastructure into the cloud. With use cases from 10 to 10,000 systems, T-Systems captures new routes to markets combined with new levels of operational efficiency and quality.” – Ralf Poggemann, Digital Division, Cloud Partner Products and Ecosystems, T-Systems

Pricing and Availability

Additional Resources

About VMware

VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility. Built on VMware’s industry-leading virtualization technology, our solutions deliver a brave new model of IT that is fluid, instant and more secure. Customers can innovate faster by rapidly developing, automatically delivering and more safely consuming any application. With 2014 revenues of $6 billion, VMware has more than 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.