VMware’s Project Arctic gets going as Broadcom plans for the next generation of infrastructure software

While VMware continues to run its operations as usual since Broadcom announced a US$69 million acquisition, the question on the minds of most of its customers would be what’s going to happen to VMware’s portfolio of services once the acquisition is completed.

Despite these concerns, Tom Krause, Broadcom’s President, and CEO stated recently that bringing VMware’s multi-cloud offerings and Broadcom’s software portfolio together after the deal closes will enable customers greater choice and flexibility to build, run, manage, connect and protect traditional and modern applications at scale across diversified, distributed environments.

“Simply put, this combination will help customers better meet the demands of the incredibly complex IT landscape head-on. We share VMware’s commitment to working in close partnership with customers on joint engineering and innovation initiatives to drive enhanced value and performance,” he wrote in a blog post.

While it remains to be seen how both companies will integrate their solutions, VMware continues with its momentum in innovating benefits for organizations. As such, with more businesses looking to have the benefits of the cloud in their on-premises infrastructure, Project Arctic was introduced last year at VMworld 2021.

Project Arctic is expected to enable businesses to enhance their infrastructure by providing centralized cloud-based infrastructure management, integrated Kubernetes, access to new hybrid cloud services, and a flexible subscription model with minimal disruption. By natively integrating cloud connectivity into vSphere, Project Arctic will bring multi-cloud to the fingertips of vSphere customers. Simply put, Project Arctic will make vSphere cloud-aware, making hybrid cloud the default operating model.

“VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ represent the next major evolution of those foundational solutions that customers know and trust. Wherever customers are on their digital transformation journey and in executing their cloud strategy, vSphere+ and vSAN+ will help accelerate their transformation by bringing the benefits of cloud to their existing on-premises infrastructure and workloads, along with simplified consumption via a flexible subscription model,” commented Krish Prasad, senior vice president, and general manager for VMware Cloud Platform Business, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group, VMware.

As an integral part of VMware’s Cloud strategy, vSphere+ and vSAN+ will enable customers to activate add-on hybrid cloud services that deliver on key use cases for business-critical applications running on-premises, including disaster recovery and ransomware protection. Organizations of all sizes will be able to consume new capabilities, security, and product updates at a much faster pace and vastly simplify their operations, without making changes to their existing applications or hardware.

With the increasing adoption of tech especially for infrastructure management, vSphere+ and vSAN+ will provide a unified infrastructure management experience for these distributed environments via the VMware Cloud Console. The console features global inventory, configuration, alerts, administration, and security status for on-premises deployments.

Operational tasks can be directly performed from the VMware Cloud Console such as managing configurations and policies across their deployments. Additionally, organizations will benefit from a vastly simplified lifecycle management experience through cloud-enabled automation of updates of on-premises infrastructure components.

With Project Arctic, organizations can also accelerate developer velocity with integrated Kubernetes through a single workload platform for running VMs and containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. vSphere+ will help transform on-premises infrastructure into an enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform.  Organizations can also extend on-premises with seamless hybrid cloud services. This includes new add-on cloud services that are under development and are expected to be delivered in the future providing businesses with a streamlined path to the cloud, should they choose to migrate down the road.

As Project Arctic gets going, one thing does remain on the mind of businesses. Will VMware be able to continue to provide them the support needed in the future? For now, everything seems to be going the right direction and hopefully will remain this way.

As Krause puts it, “we are approaching the post-closing planning phase of the transaction process with an open mind, while drawing from the lessons learned from our previous acquisitions of CA and Symantec Enterprise. This means that we’ll be working in close coordination with VMware to learn more about their go-to-market, product portfolio, approach to innovation, engineering talent, partner network and, of course, strong customer footprint.”

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