This content is part of the Conference Coverage: Dell Technologies World 2019 news and analysis
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How Dell Technologies partners can align with VMware strategy

Dell Technologies partners have what they need to facilitate customers’ digital transformation journeys, according to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

At the Dell Technologies Global Partner Summit, held this week in Las Vegas in conjunction with the Dell Technologies World user forum, Gelsinger took the stage to explain how channel partners can tap into the vendor’s portfolio to align with VMware’s priorities. The virtualization pioneer’s path forward, he said, will be focused on enabling customers’ digital transformation journeys in five areas.

Hybrid cloud architecture

Dell has made “tremendous progress over the last 18 months” integrating the technologies acquired through the 2016 EMC deal, Gelsinger said. One of the new integrations introduced at Dell Technologies World, the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, uses the VMware Cloud Foundation software stack. With its aim of simplifying hybrid cloud deployment and management, Dell Technologies Cloud enables partners to support customers’ hybrid cloud environments, Gelsinger said.

Multi-cloud environments

Gelsinger pointed to an opportunity for partners to guide their customers through multi-cloud journeys. “Every one of your customers will have a multi-cloud environment,” he told Global Partner Summit attendees. He said VMware is positioning its CloudHealth cloud management platform as a tool for evaluating those environments.

Modern app development

The third area that Gelsinger discussed was enabling customers’ application development capabilities. Whereas for the last two decades the chief app development technology has been Java, the next consensus technology is Kubernetes and containers, he said. “Once again, we are committed to being on the front end of this technology,” he said. He said the Dell-owned open-source cloud platform as a service, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, is geared toward supporting customers’ app development initiatives. These initiatives have become increasingly vital as every business “needs to become a software entity if they are going to succeed in the digital environment,” he added.

Network and security environment

The NSX network virtualization platform is an area of continued investment and key to VMware’s path forward, he said. “In the hybrid cloud world, this idea of an end-to-end network that goes all the way to the edge with SD-WAN, to [the] core data center and to [the] cloud, is a critical component to enabling a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud future,” he noted. Gelsinger added that Dell and VMware will be looking to reduce customers’ reliance on a host of cybersecurity vendors by bolstering security capabilities within the Dell Technologies portfolio.

The digital workforce

Dell Technologies this week unveiled its Unified Workspace model for end user computing. “We have been working with Dell counterparts to build this underlayment of [VMware] Workspace One directly into the Dell client solutions,” he said. At Dell Technologies World, Dell executive Brett Hansen noted that Unified Workspace will look to address customers’ device deployment and management tasks without pushing partners out of customer relationships.

“[With] the portfolio of technologies that we have enabled, we uniquely with [Dell Technologies partners] can be the porters and guides for our customers and their digital transformation,” Gelsinger said.

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