The introduction of Tanzu, VMware Inc.’s modern apps portfolio, at the VMworld conference this week heralded an important move for the company in shaping the way that enterprises will run and manage software using the Kubernetes open-source container-orchestration system.

It’s important for VMware because, without a move toward app management, the data center might not be as influential as in the past.

“The biggest story I’ve seen has been the discussion of Tanzu, those cloud-native applications,” said Stu Miniman, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during and end-of-day analysis on the second day of the VMworld event in San Francisco. “The threat to VMware is if we ‘SaaS-ify’ and ‘cloudify’ and all the apps go away, the data centers disappear. And VMware, which is dominant in the data center, is left out in the cold. I love where Tanzu is going, and time will tell whether they can play in that market.”

Miniman spoke with co-hosts John Furrier, Dave Vellante and Justin Warren to discuss VMware’s appeal to operators, the impact of reacquiring Pivotal Software Inc. and concerns around the company’s recent merger and acquisition activity (see the full interview with transcript here).

Focus on operators

The new Tanzu line of products announced this week includes ways to embed Kubernetes natively into vSphere and provides a single point of operational control to manage clusters in nearly any run environment.

“VMware is for operators; it’s not for developers,” Warren said. “The addition of Tanzu and having Kubernetes in there, it’s to operate the software. They want to have Kubernetes baked into vSphere so now we’ll have new apps.”

VMware’s reacquisition of Pivotal last week will allow the company to now deploy a software development platform for building modern applications. Pivotal was purchased for $2.7 billion after it struggled since becoming a separate public company in 2018.

“I love Pivotal, what they’ve done,” Furrier said. “I’ve always felt that as a standalone company they couldn’t compete with Amazon. It’s better inside of VMware because they can package Pivotal and not have to bet the ranch on an outcome in the marketplace where it’s highly competitive.”

Despite the addition of Pivotal and the roll-out of Tanzu, there remains some concern within the VMware ecosystem about translating the company’s latest moves into genuine new offerings that will move it significantly forward.

“Practitioners are concerned about all of these mergers and acquisitions,” Vellante said. “One practitioner said if it wasn’t for all of these acquisitions that they announced last minute, what would we be hearing about here? It would have been NSX and vSAN again.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s extensive coverage of VMworld 2019:

Photo: VMware