At VMworld 2016, VMware, Inc. announced it has made huge strides in helping customers transform into digital businesses. The company's Cross-Cloud Architecture will help make private clouds easy and deliver cloud freedom and control for its customers.

On the VMworld stage in Las Vegas, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger highlighted the massive adoption of cloud but also the minimal connection across these clouds and how businesses are grappling with this constraint. Gelsinger cited an August 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit global survey, commissioned by VMware, which found that the majority of its 600 respondents noted IT complexity is harming the operations of the enterprise. It also found that 36 percent of senior IT executives said that IT could not move fast enough to support business users. Cloud is contributing to this complexity and if not done right, can contribute to the inefficiencies as well.

To help VMware's customers conquer these challenges, Gelsinger introduced the VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture that will give customers the ability to manage, govern and secure applications running across public clouds, including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud. In addition, VMware announced VMware Cloud Foundation which offers a new "as a service" option that delivers the full power of the SDDC in a hybrid cloud environment. Robert LeBlanc, SVP of IBM Cloud joined Gelsinger on stage as IBM is the first VMware vCloud Air Network partner to deliver the new offerings.

"We believe that all businesses who want to thrive must embrace being a 'digital business,'" said Gelsinger. "Partners and customers want to engage with a mobile experience, and there is no longer a distinction between digital and traditional. The VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture is the strategy to run, manage, connect and secure apps in this all-digital world."

The keynote concluded with Guido Appenzeller, chief technology strategy officer for networking and security at VMware, providing a tech preview of upcoming Cross-Cloud Services™. These new SaaS offerings are under development but attendees got a first look from Appenzeller who provided a number of demos featuring discovery and analytics, compliance and security, and deployment and migration. The demos showcased how these offerings will allow central IT to protect data and applications and control costs while enabling developers and the businesses to innovate freely in the clouds they choose.

For the keynote playback visit: https://www.vmworld.com/en/us/learning/general-sessions.html.