5G ushering biggest capital investment build-up of our careers

Patrick P. Gelsinger is the CEO of VMware, which deals in software for complex digital infrastructure. Patrick gave the Keynote address at VMWare 2019, held in August at San Francisco. Thomas George attended their annual flagship event and presents some excerpts from the Keynote…

On today’s stunning diversity and tomorrow’s promise…

Today there are thousands of applications that are integrated in deep, meaningful and central ways! It's stunning to see who's building these applications. We’ve seen an explosion of developers tripling over the last 10 years. Even more powerfully, 6X the number of applications. At the same time we're seeing incredible diversity in the apps, the languages and the environments. Over the next five years it just explodes to two-thirds of a billion applications.

How would that be scalable? How do we streamline the infrastructure and coding the environment to enable them to deploy that? But as the saying goes: We ain't seen nothing yet! It was cloud as the foundation and we're about to redefine the application spirits. We’re seeing AI, Edge and 5G moving to the edge of the physical and digital worlds bringing intelligence to everything and being able to connect with every human on the planet.

On blockchain and Bitcoin…

Blockchain is this idea of distributed immutable trust. Is it good or bad? It’s given way to Bitcoin, which I will argue that 95 plus per cent of its uses are illicit and criminal. It is a climate crisis consuming almost a household of energy for every single entry. Bitcoin today is not okay. But the underlying technology is extremely powerful on blockchain. Distributed ledger is not the problem, though.

The most important time to be a technologist…

There's never been a more important time for being a technologist. Like it or not, we have a bigger role to play in the future of the planet and humanity than ever before. As we think about this, who will be the ones to harvest technology to address these biggest challenges of our time? Who is able to operationalize the superpowers of Edge, AI and 5G in the world? Who is able to bring these platforms and one that manage and connect them and protect all of these applications?

On the cloud infrastructure…

We live in a complex world. We live by diversity in how we think about the cloud infrastructure and how we operate on premise in the cloud on the edge. It also is more complex than ever before in the application. It's also more complicated with the operation of the subclass of these cloud services. We believe technologists who master the multi-cloud generation will follow them for the next decade. They will deliver incredible value to businesses. We're enabling that any cloud environment where you can build, run, manage, connect and contract for across that environment.

One of the greatest challenges of the multi cloud world is how do you manage across this diverse environment, and with the decentralized nature of the cloud, and this diversity will only continue to grow. And there was complexity with it, you know, lots of efficiencies, security and operational challenges that emerged from it.

The importance of Kubernetes…

We see that Kubernetes has emerged as this ubiquitous infrastructure that can connect developers and IT operations. Since Java, the virtual machine or cloud, we haven't seen technology as critical as Kubernetes. Kubernetes is achieving industry consensus as the platform that will connect these two worlds: Developers and IT operators.

The platform for hybrid cloud…

What's the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud? Simply put, we’ll say that the multi cloud is exactly that: Operating multiple clouds. In contrast, hybrid cloud provides not just consistent operations, but systems infrastructure compatibility, as well. It's a proper subset of multi cloud. VMware cloud Foundation is the platform for hybrid cloud. This is how we provide consistent infrastructure and operations. This is the cornerstone for data center, cloud and Edge. It is simply put, based on the best ingredients on Earth: Number one in compute, number one in HCI and storage.

Some number crunching…

There are thousands of VMware cloud partners across the world. These numbers are becoming spectacular. 10,000 cloud data centers over 128 countries. Now I've seen over 70 million workloads running on the VMware platform and over 10 million of those are running in the cloud. This is just getting to be an enormous footprint.

The massive 5G telco wave…

There's a massive wave occurring in the telco community. 5G is ushering maybe the biggest capital investment build-up for the rest of our careers. Telcos will play a bigger role in the cloud universe than ever before. But they're also changing their underlying infrastructure. In the past, it was a hardware centric vertical silo, like we built based on 20 years ago. Now it's becoming a software layer across multiple generations of technologies. The shift from hardware to software, we believe is a great opportunity for US industry to step back in and play a critical role in 5G.