NAVIGATING A MULTI-CLOUD WORLD

AT A CIO ROUNDTABLE EVENT ON THE SIDELINES OF GITEX, VMWARE’S KEY EXECUTIVES SHARED THE BLUEPRINT FOR INNOVATING AND TRANSFORMING BUSINESSES IN THE DIGITAL-FIRST NORM.

With the cloud adoption at an inflection point in the Middle East– and with the worlds of data centre, cloud, and edge now converging – there are key questions top of mind for IT leaders seeking to gain competitive advantage from their app modernisation efforts. Organisations not only contend with more diversity than ever before when it comes to applications, operating environments, and infrastructure – but that they want to embrace this diversity for its potential to unlock innovation and new capabilities. They are seeking freedom to move workloads to any cloud and consistency across multi-cloud environments.

In association with VMware, CXO Insight ME organised an exclusive roundtable for IT leaders to explore adapting to a multi-cloud world and discuss the skills and technology needed to modernise your apps with confidence.

Speaking at the roundtable, Enrico Boverino, SEMEA director of global solution consultants at VMware, said: “I joined VMware ten years ago when we made the promise of creating a softwaredefined data centre. Since then, it has been a really fast innovation journey where we continue to add solutions to our portfolio. A decade ago, our main value proposition was around private cloud and we enabled our customers to achieve the same scale and cost savings in their own data centres that cloud service providers offer. Today, the world is at the tipping point of innovation and companies are creating new distributed applications, which is why we have announced our strategy around multicloud and app modernisation at our recent VMworld event.”

He added that recently launched VMware cross-cloud services would help customers navigate the multi-cloud era. “This group of integrated services will help our customers to build, run and better secure apps across any cloud with freedom and flexibility.”

To help customers navigate the multicloud era, Enrico said, VMware CrossCloud services offers to deliver three key advantages: an accelerated journey to the cloud, cost efficiency, flexibility and control across any cloud. VMware CrossCloud services expands the capabilities of VMware’s product portfolio for a multicloud world and will allow customers to pick and choose the services needed on the desired cloud to meet evolving business demands.

Ahmed Auda, VMware’s regional managing director, said today an average organisation is running roughly 500 applications on clouds and cited a recent survey, which revealed 75 percent of VMware customers are relying on two or more public clouds, and 40% are using three or more.

This multi-cloud approach increases app velocity and innovation and allows organisations to be much more agile and resilient. However, a multi-cloud environment is far more diverse, complex, and distributed than anything organisations have managed in the past. This complexity often forces trade-offs between moving fast and managing risk, resulting in slower execution while increasing costs. “VMware’s strategy is built to help customers eliminate the tough choices and challenges by giving them a powerful combination of freedom and control in their multi-cloud business,” Auda said.

Nicola Buonnanno, SEMEA senior director at VMware Tanzu, said VMware is the only company that helps customers leverage cloud transformation without complexity and risk. “In the last 18 months, we have seen incredible adoption of digital technologies and rapid business transformation. The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation by five years. Our Tanzu portfolio, which is a modern applications development platform, combines tools, practices, solutions and platforms so that you can be confident in adopting these new technologies.”

The roundtable was attended by top CIOs in the region, including Sebastian Samuel from AW Rostamani; Sanjay Khanna from RAK Bank; Jayakumar Mohanachandran from Easa Saleh Al Gurg; Nader Ayoub from Malaffi; Vinay Sharma from Gulftainer; Fayaz Badubhai from Al Yousuf; Sunando Choudhuri from ADNEC; Ajay Rathi from Damac Properties; MN Chaturvedi from Al Shirawi Group; Venkatesh Mahadevan from Dubai Investment Group; Prabhakar Posam from Transworld Group; and Khalid Jalal from GARMCO Bahrain.