“VMware is radically transforming how our customers consume networking and security – allowing them to realize the agility and efficiencies of the cloud operating model through a cloud-smart approach. With a privileged position in the infrastructure and a scale out distributed software architecture, we’re able to leverage the intrinsic attributes of our platforms and deliver these unique solutions in a consumption-oriented manner.” says Tom Gillis, Senior Vice President and General Manager of VMware’s Networking and Advanced Security business group.

Simplifying Networking and Security for Multicloud

In Project Northstar, VMware announces a major advancement of its NSX platform. Announced in technology preview today, Project Northstar will transform how enterprises consume networking and security in a multi-cloud world.

Strengthening Lateral Security

VMware is strengthening its lateral security capabilities by embedding network detection and visibility into Carbon Black Cloud’s endpoint protection platform, which is now available to select customers in early access.

Expanding Security for the Data Center and Cloud Edge

Senior Vice President and GM ,VMware 

Last year, VMware announced the industry-first elastic application security edge (c) which enables the networking and security infrastructure at the data center or cloud edge to flex and adjust as app needs change. VMware is introducing:

• VMware NSX Gateway Firewall: VMware’s next-generation firewall now offers a new stateful active edge scale-out capability that significantly increases network throughput for stateful services.
• VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer: With a goal to deliver multi-layer application security at the edge, closer to applications and users for better efficiency and performance, VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer () is adding new bot management capabilities, while enhancing the security capabilities of its web application firewall, malware detection, security analytics, and DDoS protection.
• Project Watch: At VMware Explore 2022, VMware is unveiling Project Watch, a new approach to multi-cloud networking and security that will provide advanced app to app policy controls to help with continuous risk and compliance assessment.

The strategic DVDC practice area within Deloitte will provide advanced software engineering and multi-cloud services capabilities to clients to accelerate product velocity, enabled across distributed cloud environments. Deloitte and VMware will help clients pivot to modern software engineering by enhancing developer experience and enabling tools and services to deliver more efficient and effective development and delivery of products and applications. VMware Cross-Cloud services, particularly VMware Tanzu, will provide a modern cloud-native apps platform in an ecosystem strategy that enables Deloitte to deliver apps to production faster and more securely across industries such as retail, public sector, health care, financial services and automotive.

“The Deloitte VMware Distributed Cloud practice will focus on transforming our client’s technology to become an innovation enabler,” said Ranjit Bawa, principal and U.S. cloud leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Zia Yusuf, senior vice president of strategic ecosystem and industry solutions, VMware, said, “as exemplified by being a multi-year VMware Partner Achievement award winner, it’s clear that VMware and Deloitte are fully aligned on our commitment to delivering outcomes as a service to our mutual clients.”

What are the biggest challenges that businesses in the region face?

A large number of businesses in the region are yet to adopt digital technologies and if they don’t go digital, they will practically fade away in the market. At VMware, we understand how important this is for customers and try to help them throughout their digital transformation journey. We explain to them the current market trends and educate them on how they can run their businesses after opting for the transition.

What issues are holding companies back from embracing a cloud-first approach and wider digital transformation plans?

The local regulations in some countries, security concerns, data privacy, data sovereignty, and cost were major factors holding companies back from the cloud-first approach. I don’t think it is the case anymore as things have drastically changed after the pandemic hit. Most of these challenges were well addressed and enterprises are swiftly moving toward cloud solutions.

Ihab Farhoud, Director, Solution Engineering – MENAT, VMware

A shortage of multi-cloud talent is the next major challenge. It is difficult to find the talent that knows the various hyperscalers and the different cloud providers across the board. Businesses can no longer stick to one cloud provider as different clouds have different features and different capabilities. Depending on how complex the business is, having multiple clouds will satisfy most of the business requirements.

Is the situation the same for all sizes of businesses? Are larger organizations more advanced in their digital transformation plans than SMEs?

Small and medium enterprises and large enterprises have the same kinds of considerations when it comes to choosing cloud solutions. However, cost is a probably more of a factor influencing small businesses in choosing modern technologies.

How does VMware help organizations move to the cloud?

We help our customers by providing a digital platform to help them build, run, manage, secure, and connect modern applications and clouds end-to- end.

Some organizations face a challenge with cloud in that they have a lack of visibility about whether applications or workloads are running efficiently on a specific cloud, and also whether it is cost-effective to run the workload on a specific cloud. VMware solves these challenges for customers. Our platform can run traditional or legacy applications next to modern cloud-native applications. We enable customers to monitor workloads of applications protected by a single security platform across the board. VMware offers services with AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and Oracle.

Tell us about your role at VMware and the strategies you devise for the region?

I handle presales for the organization across Middle East, Turkey, and North Africa. I regularly travel across the region to meet different types of customers especially in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Egypt.

Regarding our regional strategies; we want to offer services to all sectors, including government, healthcare, education, banking, security, and mission critical sectors.

Huco is the only coveted VMware partner in Southern Europe and MENA while being among the first 6 exclusive partners globally to achieve all four of VMware’s Master Service Competencies for delivery excellence in Data Center Virtualization, Desktop & Mobility, Cloud Management & Automation and Network Virtualization. Huco is also in the process of achieving Master Service Competencies in VMware PKS and VMC on AWS.

Being the only services winner from the region, Huco becomes the exclusive GoTo partner for customer’s Transformation and Innovation journey. The company after enterprising years of combining certified skills with innovation, has 80+ digital transformation projects and 50+ workspace transformation projects in the region.

“Digital services help organizations prepare for the Fourth Industrial Revolution by building new channels to consumers while anticipating their modernization demands. At Huco we are constantly pushing the envelope of innovation boundaries by enabling these prototypes through agile designs and scalable & secure IT environments,” said Dilip Kalliyat, President, Huco.

“We congratulate Huco on winning the Partner Innovation Award for Services in the EMEA, and look forward to our continued collaboration and innovation” said Jean Philippe Barleaza, EMEA Vice President, Channel, Alliances and General Business at VMware, “VMware and our partners will continue to empower organizations of all sizes with technologies that enable digital transformation.”

The award underscores Huco’s remarkable achievements in accelerating digital transformation for large corporate and government organizations across the Middle East & North Africa.

“The award conclusively reaffirms Huco’s technical expertise across VMware’s portfolio. The kind of excellence and leadership we have established in the services business, we would like to establish in the solutions business as well and we will definitely get there.” said Ashok Chakravarthi Arulmozhi, Managing Director, Huco.

“VMware’s NFV solution is deployed in more than 50 CSPs globally supporting a wide variety of use cases and more than 300 million mobile subscribers. And with the imminent arrival of 5G, a new approach to the telco network and cloud is required to solve for the hyper distribution of virtual network functions, applications and data,” said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president and general manager, Telco NFV Group, VMware. “With VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack 3.0, service providers will be able to build software-defined, programmable, highly-distributed Telco Distributed Clouds based on open standards to deliver new advanced services to consumers, and quality-of-service-based network slices to serve the application needs for a wide variety of industries.”

VMware vCloud NFV delivers a 5G-ready NFV infrastructure (NFVI) platform, tuned to support rapid rollout of next-generation services with low latency and high network throughput, and support for a massively distributed set of end points and devices. VMware vCloud NFV enables CSPs to create an end-to-end software-based network architecture to deliver consistent, pervasive connectivity and intrinsic security to applications and virtual network functions wherever they are located, at global scale from core to cloud to edge, and independent of underlying physical infrastructure or location.

“A highly performant and reliable NFV platform is key to unlocking the cloud efficiencies that NFV promised,” said Caroline Chappell, Research Director and lead analyst for Analysys Mason’s Software-Controlled Networking research program. “It’s important that operators gain the benefits of a carrier-grade and scalable NFVI without sacrificing support for open industry standards and the ability to execute virtual network functions from multiple vendors. As operators begin to scale commercial NFV deployments, they will need robust platform features and the potential in future to run the same NFVI in multiple clouds.”

“VMware has been working with Google since 2015 to offer secure Android devices and applications, most recently with advanced support for Android Enterprise,” said Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “This partnership shows our commitment to giving customers the flexibility to pick the device of their choice and enabling the delivery of any application on any device to end users.”

Chrome OS provides multiple layers of protection including security modules, like TPM chips specialized for encryption, verified boot to check for compromises, sandboxing for containing threats and full disk encryption for data protection. Together with Workspace ONE on Chromebooks, IT administrators benefit from additional security capabilities to help deploy, configure and secure, web and SaaS applications. We are also collaborating on advancements to unify native Android applications. Windows applications can also be delivered through VMware Horizon 7 and VMware Horizon Cloud virtual applications and desktops, that can be quickly accessed through dynamic contextual decision-making, secured in the data center and provisioned through Workspace ONE. And end users will enjoy simple single sign-on (SSO) to a digital workspace that includes a catalogue of all the business and productivity applications they need, while IT benefits from improved data security and centralized management and delivery of applications.

“With Chrome OS we continue to see momentum in the enterprise given our efforts to deliver speed, security, simplicity and shareability to customers,” said Rajen Sheth, director of product management for Chrome OS at Google. “From Windows to web to mobile apps, this partnership with VMware and the integration with VMware Workspace One will allow our customers to easily and securely deploy applications on Chrome OS devices.”

“Application ecosystems are a major factor in the success of an endpoint operating system,” said Phil Hochmuth, program director, Enterprise Mobility at IDC. “Growth in the Chrome OS application ecosystem has improved the quality of the user experience with the platform. Adding VMware Workspace ONE to further support the management and delivery of business applications to Chrome OS devices is a logical move forward.”

Workspace ONE with VMware AirWatch and Horizon support for Chromebook is available immediately.

“VMware and Samsung share a common vision of helping Galaxy S8 end-users experience the full capabiltiies of the device while delivering an elegant end-user experience,” said Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “Our expanded partnership will further enable business end-users to remain productive by delivering a unifed digital workspace experience that offers continuity whether they are using the mobile device from a desk connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, or in the palm of their hands using touch and gesture interactions – elevating the experience of mobile workers to the next level.”

Samsung DeX redefines what a smartphone can do to keep mobile workers productive with just their smartphones. It will provide an Android-based, desktop-like experience that enables end-users to seamlessly access apps, edit documents, browse the web, watch videos, reply to messages and more, directly from the smartphone on a larger display, with the ability to use a keyboard and mouse. Samsung DeX will also provide an ultimate productivity environment with a completely redesigned Android UI optimized for use with a keyboard and mouse including multiple-resizable windows, contextual menus and a desktop version Web browser with Samsung Internet. With Samsung DeX, enterprise end-users can also be assured their smartphones and data are protected by the Samsung Knox security platform that is built into the smartphone.

Together with VMware Workspace ONE and VMware Horizon, the new Samsung Galaxy 8 smartphone with Samsung DeX can deliver a common digital workspace experience when end-users access their Windows desktops and applications in the office, or Windows, mobile and cloud applications on-the-go. The Workspace ONE solution integrates application and access management, unified endpoint management and virtual desktop and application delivery. This integration helps organizations evolve silo-ed cloud and mobile investments, and unify the end-user experience across devices using a platform-based approach. The end-user experience is further simplified and secured through a common identity framework using single sign-on authentication and corporate information is secured in the data center through Horizon or on the device using Samsung Knox and industry-leading solution, VMware AirWatch.

“The successful collaboration between Samsung and VMware over the years with VMware AirWatch has helped many customers across the globe embrace BYO and enterprise mobility,” said Kevin Gilroy, executive vice president and general manager, Commerical Division, Samsung. “This extension of our partnership into the delivery of virtual desktop and applications through digital workspaces with the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Samsung DeX will further customer choice in best-of-breed technology.”

VMware was recognized for the second consecutive year by IDC Marketscape for having the most complete mix of business and solution strategies and capabilities for delivering virtual desktops and applications through its VMware Horizon portfolio of solutions and services that includes VMware Horizon 7, Horizon Cloud and VMware App Volumes.