VMware Unveils New and Enhanced Cloud Solutions to Further Simplify and Automate Management of the Software-Defined Data Center and Enable IT as a Service

Expanded Offerings Enable IT to Deliver On-Demand Access to Any Service With Cost Transparency and Automated Operations Across Multiple Clouds and Platforms; New Release of VMware vSphere(R) Data Protection(TM) Advanced Increases Leading Backup Capabilities for VMware vSphere(R)


BARCELONA, SPAIN--(Marketwired - Oct 15, 2013) - At VMworld® 2013 Europe, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced new capabilities and enhancements across its portfolio of cloud management solutions to simplify and automate management of IT services for multiple clouds and platforms. New product releases introduced today include VMware vCloud® Automation Center™ 6.0, VMware vCenter™ Operations Management Suite™ 5.8, VMware IT Business Management Suite™, and VMware vCenter™ Log Insight™ 1.5. In addition, VMware will update the automation and management capabilities of VMware vCloud® Suite 5.5, recently introduced on August 26, 2013.

"For IT to keep pace with business demands, stay relevant and deliver IT services with agility, it must transition from being builders to brokers of IT services," said Ramin Sayar, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management, VMware. "VMware cloud management solutions enable IT to deliver this agility while standardizing and ensuring governance and control -- whether the goal is to better manage a highly virtualized environment, build a vSphere-based private cloud, extend to the hybrid cloud or broker services across many providers."

As IT organizations evolve into brokers of IT services, they can rely on VMware cloud management solutions to enable key aspects of IT as a Service including:

  • On-demand access to any service: To help meet the expectations of immediate access to services, IT can increase agility and deliver infrastructure, application, desktop and custom services on diverse platforms and clouds with a common governance framework to simplify and control how services are consumed.
  • Cost transparency: By providing transparency into the cost of VMs, infrastructure services and the use of shared resources, IT can help end users make informed decisions about the cost of services across private and public clouds, increasing accountability and efficient use of resources.
  • Automated operations: Managing IT services today requires management solutions that are tightly integrated, leverage big data analytics and are purpose-built for the dynamic nature of the software-defined data center. This approach provides proactive management and unprecedented operational visibility of the performance and health of applications and underlying virtual and physical infrastructure, including storage and networking.
  • Multiple clouds and platforms: VMware cloud management solutions support heterogeneous hypervisor and physical environments and multiple clouds, providing customers increased automation, with a unified management approach and freedom of choice and flexibility.

"Customers around the world rely on Orange Business Services' best-in-class communication, infrastructure and business critical application solutions to power their businesses," said Axel Haentjens, vice president, Marketing & International, Orange Cloud for Business. "To drive greater value from its cloud, Orange Business Services uses VMware cloud management solutions to automate rapid service delivery as well as operations management, thereby increasing agility as well as resource utilization and efficiency."

VMware Cloud Management Boosts Automation, Heterogeneous Support and Financial Visibility
The new product capabilities across VMware's comprehensive management portfolio reinforce VMware's commitment to provide industry-leading solutions that are tightly integrated with VMware vSphere® while offering customers freedom of choice to run services on diverse platforms and across a hybrid cloud. Today VMware introduced significant enhancements and a new offering across its cloud management product portfolio:

  • vCloud Automation Center 6.0 - Delivering business agility through IT automation
    VMware vCloud Automation Center provides the agility customers need by automating the delivery of personalized IT services. The new release of VMware vCloud Automation Center will offer customers a single solution for the rapid delivery of applications, including application release automation and support for DevOps automation tools, through the incorporation of VMware vCloud Application Director. The product will feature a self-service catalog for requesting and managing all types of IT services providing customers with on-demand access to any service and reducing time to value.

    VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 will enable customers to design any custom IT service in minutes (such as Hadoop-as-a-Service), to complement current out-of-the-box service capabilities for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS). Further extending its multi-platform and multi-cloud capabilities, VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 will introduce support for VMware vCloud Hybrid Service™, VMware NSX™ and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack-based cloud environments.
    Learn more about what's new in vCloud Automation Center 6.0.
    Read what partners are saying about
    vCloud Automation Center 6.0.

  • vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 - Automated operations management for the mobile cloud era
    The VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite provides automated operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity and configuration management. The new release will offer enhanced performance analytics for business-critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. In addition, VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 will introduce analytics for a broad range of storage vendors and devices to help administrators pinpoint configuration errors, resources issues and performance bottlenecks. New monitoring dashboards delivered out of the box provide deeper visibility into applications running on Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon Web Services.

    VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 will enable IT organizations to standardize on a single operations management platform designed to enable higher quality of service, operational efficiency, control and compliance across all applications and services running on virtual, physical and cloud environments.
    Learn more about what's new in the vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8.

  • VMware IT Business Management Suite - Transparency into cost and quality of IT services
    The VMware IT Business Management Suite provides transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services, enabling CIOs to align IT with business priorities. Today, VMware introduces VMware IT Business Management Suite 1.0 Standard Edition, a new addition to the VMware IT Business Management Suite. Targeted at the head of infrastructure, this solution will allow infrastructure and business stakeholders to quickly understand the cost and consumption of their virtual infrastructure across private and public cloud environments through integrations with VMware vCenter Server™, VMware IT Benchmarking™ and VMware vCloud Automation Center. The solution will also enable the comparison of internal costs with those of public cloud providers offering similar infrastructure services. 

    VMware IT Business Management Suite 8.0 Advanced and Enterprise editions will introduce additional persona-based dashboards tailored to the unique needs of the CIO, CFO of IT, IT project managers and line-of-business owners. This latest release will also feature native integration with VMware IT Benchmarking, allowing enterprises to continuously compare the cost of their services against industry peers and companies with similar operational characteristics.
    Learn more about what's new in the VMware IT Business Management Suite.

  • vCenter Log Insight 1.5 - Automated Big Data log analytics to simplify root cause analysis
    VMware vCenter Log Insight delivers real-time insights and monitoring of data from applications, virtualized infrastructure and physical hardware to help improve operational efficiency and minimize costs and troubleshooting time. Integration between VMware vCenter Log Insight and VMware vCenter Operations further enables organizations to combine and analyze both structured and unstructured data for end-to-end operations management. New VMware vCenter Log Insight capabilities will ease adoption in enterprise environments and enable rapid time to value. Optimized for VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5 will also simplify the use of content packs developed by partners, allowing for increased visibility into the logs of infrastructure software and hardware commonly found in virtualized and cloud environments.
    Learn more about what's new in vCenter Log Insight 1.5.

VMware Business Continuity Solutions Increase Uptime, Decrease Complexity and Minimize Cost
Improving Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery continues to be the No. 1 reason why customers virtualize1.Protecting data is key to any business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. VMware partnered with EMC to deliver VMware vSphere Data Protection, a backup solution that optimally addresses the challenges of SMBs and midsized organizations. Today, VMware also announced VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced, introducing capabilities spanning assured recovery, increased efficiency and greater scalability:

  • vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced - Efficient and simple backup and recovery solution for VMware vSphere
    Powered by EMC Avamar, VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced delivers industry-leading storage-efficiency for backups, unique capabilities to accelerate recovery and unparalleled integration with VMware vSphere. VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced will feature new capabilities including network-efficient backup data replication, integration with EMC Data Domain, a new Microsoft SharePoint agent, and automated backup verification. Customers will now benefit from disaster recovery protection, enhanced scalability and global deduplication with EMC Data Domain, and granular, application-consistent backups for Microsoft SharePoint.

    The built-in backup data replication capabilities of VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced will enable partners in the VMware Service Provider Program to deliver backup to the cloud services. SunGard will be the first service provider to introduce backup and disaster recovery services for both VMware vSphere Data Protection and VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced customers to replicate data to the SunGard cloud.
    Read what partners are saying about VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced.

VMware Cloud Management Marketplace
VMware has released VMware® Cloud Management Marketplace, a one-stop destination for trusted management solutions from VMware and its industry leading partner ecosystem. Customers can browse, download and try management solutions from industry leading vendors. These solutions, available in a service catalog setting, streamline the provisioning process, and are built in partnership with VMware using open and extensible product interfaces and implementation SDKs.

New Cloud Management Services
Today, VMware also announced new professional services to help customers outline the strategy and technology roadmap to define and implement cloud management and automation solutions. The new Cloud Automation Design and Deploy service focuses on policy-based automation, enabling customers to build cloud management infrastructure for improved time-to-project completion, operational reliability and efficiency. Enhanced VMware Accelerate Advisory Services help organizations evaluate the value of cloud operations and cloud business management solutions within their IT environments, mapping out a plan for current and future business requirements.
Learn more about VMware Professional Services.

Pricing and Availability
VMware's enhanced cloud management solutions are expected to be available in Q4 2013. VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5 is now available for download via a public beta program today at: http://bit.ly/log-insight-beta-15

Customers interested in VMware cloud management solutions or VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced, among other offerings, can try VMware Hands-on Labs Online at: http://labs.hol.vmware.com/

Additional Resources

About VMware
VMware (NYSE: VMW) is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable businesses to thrive in the Cloud Era. Customers rely on VMware to help them transform the way they build, deliver and consume Information Technology resources in a manner that is evolutionary and based on their specific needs. With 2012 revenues of $4.61 billion, VMware has more than 500,000 customers and 55,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware, VMworld, vSphere, vSphere Data Protection, vCloud, vCloud Suite, vCloud Hybrid Service, vCloud Automation Center, vCenter, vCenter Server, vCenter Operations Management Suite, VMware IT Business Management Suite, VMware IT Benchmarking, Log Insight, and NSX are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding the expected features, pricing and availability of VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0, VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8, VMware vCloud Suite 5.5, VMware IT Business Management Suite, VMware vCenter Log Insight and VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced 5.5 and their potential benefits to customers. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to (i) changes to priorities and levels of government spending; (ii) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (iii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iv) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures, industry consolidation, entry of new competitors into the virtualization, end user and cloud computing markets, and new product and marketing initiatives by our competitors; (v) our customers' ability to develop, and to transition to, new products and computing strategies such as cloud computing and desktop virtualization; (vi) the uncertainty of customer acceptance of emerging technology; (vii) rapid technological and market changes in virtualization software and platforms for cloud and desktop computing; (viii) changes to product development timelines; (ix) VMware's ability to protect its proprietary technology; and (x) VMware's ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees.. These forward looking statements are based on current expectations and are subject to uncertainties and changes in condition, significance, value and effect as well as other risks detailed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K that we may file from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. VMware assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

(1) Forrester Research, "Server Virtualization Predictions for 2013," March 2013

Contact Information:

Eloy Ontiveros
VMware Global Communications
eontiveros@vmware.com
1.650.427.6145

Angela Nibbs
Hill & Knowlton strategies for VMware
Angela.nibbs@hkstrategies.com
1.415.281.7181