Ready for VMware Explore 2023?  Are you attending the show?  If so, make sure to get IBM on your MUST SEE list.

Make sure to read this exclusive VMware Explore 2023 interview between VMblog and IBM, with the show taking place at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center, August 21-24, 2023.

VMblog:  If you were giving a VMware Explore attendee a quick overview of the company, what would you say?  How would you describe the company?

IBM:  IBM has strong focus on hybrid cloud and AI. These are the two most transformative technologies of our time - designed to help enterprises future-proof their businesses by increasing speed and productivity, reducing costs, driving innovation, and fuelling growth. IBM is creating new opportunities for our clients with our unique ability to integrate technology, business, and industry expertise to give our clients a competitive advantage.

Hybrid cloud enables our clients to host workloads wherever they need, without locking them out of innovation while delivering the seamless experiences customers' demand. With the right approach to hybrid cloud, we're helping clients meet security and compliance requirements, and reducing 3^rd and 4^th party risk.

IBM works to understand the uniqueness of your business processes and applications as an organization to develop a workload placement strategy and best understand which data should reside in which environment. These decisions are based on five key dimensions: resiliency, performance, security, compliance, and total cost of ownership (TCO). IBM has been dedicated to delivering on these top parameters with IBM Cloud, particularly for clients in highly regulated industries, so they can make decisions on their critical workloads in the mid- and back- office with confidence.

VMblog:  Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company's technology offerings?  What kind of message will an attendee hear from you this year? 

IBM:  IBM Cloud is the only public cloud provider that offers customers a fully automated choice of self-managed and IBM-managed VMware offerings.

IBM's self-managed portfolio of VMware offerings is primarily meant for GSIs and MSPs, but we also see strong adoption among customers who value the level of control of an on-prem environment for their infrastructure. In this model, the user is responsible for the maintenance of the VMware software stack, has root access to the hosted vCenter, and manages their VMware-virtualized VMs through vSphere-API-compatible tools - for example VMware vSphere Web Client.

We also offer IBM-Managed offerings across dual consumption models - single tenant and multi-tenant. In this model, IBM Cloud maintains the VMware management infrastructure, and the client manages their VMs via the VMware Cloud Director (vCD) cloud management platform portal.

This year at VMware Explore, we'll be showcasing the full range of IBM solutions, including solutions from IBM Cloud, IBM Storage and IBM Consulting - to help clients solve problems related to app modernization, data protection and resiliency, and virtual desktops/desktop as a service (DaaS).

VMblog:  What specifically does your company offer a VMware shop or a VMware implementation?  What problems do you solve for them?

IBM:  IBM Cloud offers clients a way to balance agility, risk, and TCO based on their personalized environments for a truly custom solution. There are three key areas where we deliver for our clients.

First, IBM has the capability to handle all types of workloads - from simple, to mission critical. IBM Cloud offers thousands of hardware profiles to fit our clients' exact performance needs. As the only CSP to be certified to run SAP on VMware, our clients - supported by IBM Consulting as the trusted hybrid cloud partner for deploying and managing cloud solutions - have been able to move to IBM Cloud in weeks instead of months or years.

IBM is also able to cater to various workload needs, use cases, and management requirements. This is because we offer the most flexible tenancy and management options for our clients - whether they want a self-managed or cloud managed environment or single or multi-tenancy.

Critically, the IBM Cloud platform helps clients mitigate risk with the highest set of regulatory and compliance standards by industry. This enables us to help clients transform business process in the mid-and back-office that cannot be fulfilled by general-purpose cloud. Also, IBM Cloud for Financial Services includes policy-as-code using built-in security and compliance controls and is setting a new standard for the compliance-conscious industry. We are delivering a cloud to serve the challenging needs of regulated industries that has the laws, rules and regulations built in from the outset (policy-as-code) - which means regulated companies can innovate at the pace of the most agile startup while being knowingly in control.

VMblog:  How does your company work with VMware?  Where do you fit within the VMware ecosystem?

IBM:  As the world's largest operator of VMware workloads in the cloud, IBM works to enable clients to modernize with security and efficiency at the forefront. IBM is all in on hybrid cloud our partnership with VMware is critical to support the virtualization of on-prem workloads running on VMware. We work with VMware to help our joint clients embrace hybrid cloud and modernize mission-critical workloads in any environment.   

To meet the needs of our clients, VMware and IBM are building on our more than 20-year partnership with new and expanded solutions that will help enterprises modernize mission-critical workloads across any environment. These solutions are designed to provide our clients choice in how to more securely deploy and manage VMware workloads, while offering flexible consumption models to reduce overall IT costs and optimize investments.

VMblog:  VMworld has typically been a launching platform for new products.  At VMware Explore, will your company be announcing anything new?  If so, can you give us a sneak peek?  Or, have you launched anything new recently that you can spotlight for us?

IBM:  IBM and VMware aim to support joint clients on their digital transformations no matter where they are in their journey. To this end, IBM will be the first public cloud provider to launch a new partner-managed service based on VMware Cloud editions as part of the VMware Cross-Cloud managed service initiative. The forthcoming VMware Cross-Cloud managed service will provide customers with a hybrid cloud aligned to a NIST-validated framework that allows for seamless migration of workloads between on premises and IBM Cloud environments. VMware Cross-Cloud managed services from IBM will enable customers to lower TCO for on-premises environments, build and modernize applications faster, and simplify operations while meeting addressing security and industry-compliance requirements.

This news, among several new joint offerings with VMware that we will be announcing at VMware Explore, will showcase how we are helping our clients accelerate their modernization with the combined power of IBM and VMware hybrid cloud; prioritize their security maturity across complex hybrid cloud environments; and leverage the transformative power of ecosystem partnerships.

VMblog:  VMware gets the big stage to deliver their message during the keynote sessions.  If you were giving the keynote, what big topics would you discuss?  What big changes or trends do you see taking shape in the industry for 2023 and beyond?

IBM:  IBM is committed to advancing our value proposition across AI and sustainability. Currently, we are experiencing the next wave of AI innovation, which is perhaps the most transformative yet. Globally, organizations are determining how best to insert AI in everything they do. IBM has been at the forefront of AI for years - from creating AI technologies, deploying AI solutions, and thinking through the unique challenges of AI use in business. For example, we recently announced the availability of IBM watsonx on IBM Cloud. Businesses are demanding AI that produces accurate and trustworthy results, can scale across clouds, and can be easily adapted to enterprise domains and use cases and watsonx is designed to help them address those needs.  

Also, as part of any AI transformation roadmap, business must consider how to manage the growth of data across cloud and on-prem environments. This is especially critical as organizations face increasing pressure to reduce their carbon emissions. For IBM, reducing environmental impact to help create a more sustainable future is a top priority and we are committed to helping clients achieve both sustainability and business goals. We recently launched the AI-enabled IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator to help clients better understand the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their IT workloads and give them insights into how they can adjust their strategies to make sustainability a priority in their organization.

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