Rick Villars, IDC | VMware Cloud on Dell EMC

Rick Villars, VP, Datacenter and Cloud, IDC sits down with Stu Miniman to discuss industry dynamics and the second generation for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.

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A dedicated cloud

It’s a trend that research firm International Data Corp. has been tracking, and it reflects the impact of cloud technologies on the data center. Major cloud providers have built bridges, such as Google Anthos, Azure Stack and AWS Outposts, between data centers and their platforms to facilitate an on-prem cloud-like experience. The data center was not disappearing, but it was being gradually transformed.

“We realized we were about to see a new generation of private cloud environments,” Villars said. “But this will be different, not because of new technology, but there will be different use cases and a different approach. It’s not so much a private cloud; it’s a dedicated cloud.”

What VMware anticipated with Project Dimension in 2018 and what IDC has since validated was the rise of localized compute that consumed resources in an as-a-service method. This gave enterprise customers the agility and responsiveness necessary to process workloads, but more importantly it also would enable cloud infrastructure in new locations, away from the centralized data center.

“I have resources dedicated to a business or service application that I want to get done, and I want to operate that just like those other clouds,” Villars explained. “I want this to be a platform for creating new services that I want to deliver in a location — a factory, a hospital, a city block. We said this is going to lead to the emergence of a whole new product class, which we started to call ‘local cloud as a service.’”

In a report issued last year, IDC found that annual subscription spending for local cloud as a service, or LCaaS, would reach $5 billion in two years. That may not seem like a lot compared to other solutions on the market, but it represents a dramatic rise from less than $1 billion forecast for 2020.

Colocation and capacity
Enterprise interest in colocation, the availability of third-party data centers, plays into this trend as well. Global spending on global colocation services is expected to reach $38 billion in three years as multicloud solutions fuel the need to connect myriad networks.

Colocation solutions also allow enterprises to place data and applications closer to public clouds, thus reducing latency. Last year, VMware expanded its partnership with global colocation provider Equinix Inc. to support VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.

“There are different ways we can expand this,” Wang said. “Many of our customers have expressed interest in colocators. They want us to provide an integrated solution.”

VMware’s second-generation solution represents a turbo boost from the first. It includes double the virtual machine density and twice the amount of capacity for resource intensive workloads.

(* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)