The future of enterprise IT will be defined by the need to securely deliver a more consumer-like application experience that can be updated in a matter of minutes.
Speaking at the launch this week of a VMware Business Mobility initiative, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger says this brave new world of enterprise IT will require not only fundamental changes to the way enterprise applications are built and delivered, but also the way IT infrastructure is provisioned and managed.
The VMware Business Mobility initiative unifies the delivery of identity management as a service provided by the AirWatch unit of VMware and the software-defined networking (SDN) technologies that VMware gained when it acquired Nicira in 2012.
The linking of those two technologies, says Gelsinger, will prove to be critical in enabling IT organizations to manage new classes of mobile applications that IT infrastructure will be able to dynamically support by scaling resources up and down as required. These next-generation software-defined data center environments, says Gelsinger, will be in turn based on hyper-converged sets of infrastructure that will be considerably simpler to manage.
At the same time, Gelsinger postulates that the end result will be a smaller number of enterprise IT vendors that organizations need to manage in order to achieve that level of IT agility.
Clearly, VMware has ambitious plans for the future that go well beyond the virtual machine that any organization happens to be running. The degree to which VMware can convince CIOs that it’s the right company to deliver on that vision, of course, remains to be seen. But some form of this vision of the future of enterprise IT is most certainly about to come to pass.