On the heels of its announced spin-off of VMware, Dell Technologies may be looking to sell its Boomi cloud business as well.
Michael Dell has been on a mission to streamline the company that bears his name, and Dell has been offloading the various businesses it has acquired over the years, including RSA and VMware. According to Bloomberg, Dell is now exploring a sale of Boomi.
Boomi specializes in helping companies integrate the various cloud platforms they use. It’s believed a sale of the business could be worth as much as $3 billion. The business could be an asset to any number of other companies looking to expand their cloud offerings.
According to Bloomberg’s sources, the talks are still in their early stages and may not come to fruition.
Alphabet’s Verily and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have partnered with Microsoft to advance biomedical research.
Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft may be major rivals in the cloud market, but Alphabet’s Verily — its life and sciences company — is working with Microsoft to help remove the technical barriers for biomedical researchers.
But making use of these important datasets remains difficult for researchers who face huge, siloed data estates, disparate tools, fragmented systems and data standards, and varying governance and security policies.
The new partnership aims to break through those barriers by bringing together Microsoft’s cloud, data and AI technologies, and global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners to accelerate development of global biomedical research through the Terra platform, provide greater access and empower the open-source community. Building on the open-source foundation of Terra, the new collaboration will advance the ability of data scientists, biomedical researchers and clinicians around the world to collaborate in tackling some of the most complex and widespread diseases facing society today.
Emphasizing the importance of a multi-cloud approach, a Verily spokesperson told VentureBeat that “Verily feels strongly that the open data ecosystem should be multi-cloud.”
Biomedical research is more important than ever, especially as the world grapples with a global pandemic. Verily, the Broad Institute and Microsoft’s efforts should go a long way toward easing the technical challenges biomedical researchers face.
Rescale and Hyundai have announced they are collaborating on a multi-cloud, high performance computing (HPC) environment for the mobility industry.
As with many industries, the mobility industry is turning to the cloud to help with research and development. Relying on cloud-based HPC resources gives companies the ability to scale faster and with fewer limitations.
“Close collaboration between IT and the field is essential for Hyundai Motor’s digital transformation strategy,” said JungSik Suh, Senior Vice President and Head of ICT Division of Hyundai Motor Group. “We are pleased that the Rescale cloud platform will be the venue for this collaboration, and expect it to increase research efficiency by moving away from the physical limitations of a static on-premise environment.”
Resale’s platform will help Hyundai develop autonomous vehicles, enhance fuel efficiency, run simulations and test new safety features.
“As an intelligent control plane for big compute, Rescale enables researchers to collaborate seamlessly, and ensures simulation workloads always run on the most performant architectures from our multi-cloud provider infrastructure network.” said Edward Hsu VP of Product at Rescale. “We are pleased to be working with Hyundai Motor Group to drive unprecedented mobility innovation.”
“VMWare allows the datacenter to act like a public cloud,” says VMWare COO Sanjay Poonen. “It is a multicloud world. While AWS will be first and preferred for us, we want every customer that has VMWare in the private cloud but AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Alibaba, those are the top five hyperscalers, and all of them have embraced VMWare.”
Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMWare, discusses the incredible growth of VMWare which is driven by their ability to connect companies to any and every cloud in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Software Is Defining Everything
We had a great quarter. You have to put the bigger picture in perspective. We’re in the golden age of software where software is defining everything. Software companies, in general, are doing well. What we have done as a company is focus on making the datacenter software-driven and we think there is a bright future there. We showed some examples of that in hyperconverged (HCI) and in software-defined networking (SDN).
We also showed some incredible momentum with our partnerships in the hybrid-cloud. Amazon is obviously first and preferred there. We announced a partnership with Azure. There is also the digital workspace which is all of the devices. We think our future is bright and we just have to keep executing. Our view is always the long-run.
In This Software Future We Are Not Tethered To One Company
I think there is a little bit of a misperception that we should nip in the bud (regarding correlating Dell’s earnings with VMWare). First off, VMWare’s business with Dell in these areas like hyperconverged, we’ve now surpassed companies like Nutanix who are number one in hyper-converged infrastructure, and in the digital workspace where we are partnering with Dell Laptops, those are going very well. We want Dell and VMWare to do well together. In the datacenter we work with Dell, HPE, Cisco, Lenovo, etc. There is no one hardware player that is the majority of our business.
In cloud we work with AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, and IBM. You won’t find another company that has got as many hybrid-cloud partners. In the digital workspace, we work with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In this software future, we are not tethered to one company. We are optimized to Dell, we are not tethered to them. You need a software-based solution for any of these areas, the datacenter, the cloud, or the digital workspace during tough times and in good times.
It Is a Multi-Cloud World
You should think about applications like mobile homes. They’re going to move from the datacenter to the cloud on this freeway called VMWare. The mobile home could go to one cloud and may come back. VMWare allows the datacenter to act like a public cloud. We make the hardware datacenter look like Amazon. Now if you are an Amazon customer, and they have 30-35 percent market share, number one in the market for cloud, they are our preferred cloud partner, we can help customers. We have many customers who are adopting VMWare cloud in AWS.
For those customers who said we are not an Amazon shop, for example, we quoted Walmart in our earnings announcement, they are using Azure. They have an option now because we announced a partnership with Azure. There are some customers that are going to have some other clouds. It is a multicloud world. While AWS will be first and preferred for us, we want every customer that has VMWare in the private cloud but AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Alibaba, those are the top five hyperscalers, and all of them have embraced VMWare.
IBM is a great partner of VMWare. We love their services business. IBM Cloud has 2,000+ customers. We are going to partner really well with Ginni Rometty and the team. We compete with a small part of Red Hat’s business in containers. Over 80 percent of Red Hat’s business is Linux, a good part of their business which is OpenShift and JBoss, is not doing so well. The future of containers is a small part of the business. We can walk and chew gum. We can partner with IBM and compete with that small part of Red Hat and that’s our focus. We want a big tent at VMWare. We want to partner with as many people as possible and compete with as few people as possible.
Make Your Story Sesame Street Simple
First off, if you want to serve your customers well start by serving your employees. One of my professors at the Harvard Business School, Len Schlesinger, wrote an article and book on service profit chain. What he talked about is if you want to create shareholder value focus not just on customer satisfaction but satisfied employees. Hug your start. Take care of the best and brightest who come in there.
The second one is something that all of us can do which is make your story Sesame Street simple. All too often, I see product managers and account executives blabbering on with PowerPoints. Let’s tell the story just like you are telling the story to your mother or to your kids. Ironically, when you make things simple you’re going back to the basic principals of Steven Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People. It’s not that complicated. Have customer empathy.
It Is a Multi-Cloud World, Says VMWare COO Sanjay Poonen
“If you think about where we are on the technology adoption curve and the trillion dollars of spend that are ultimately going to move, there’s no doubt that it’s a cloud-first world,” says Prashanth Chandasekar, Senior Vice President & General Manager at Rackspace. “But the vast majority of the workloads exist in traditional IT. How do we take on that hybrid movement? Amazon is very aggressively investing and we’re investing with them and helping our customers along their journey effectively.”
Prashanth Chandasekar, SVP & GM at Rackspace, discusses how Rackspace has transformed from primarily a hosting company to a technology service company helping enterprises effectively and efficiently move to the cloud on AWS and other platforms in an interview on theCUBE at AWS Summit London 2019:
Rackspace Helping Companies Navigate to the AWS Cloud
Ultimately part of the reason why customers in our install base were reaching out to us and saying, ”Hey Rackspace, you’ve done a phenomenal job helping us in the first evolution of our journey, can you help us now in this new world where it’s actually quite complicated?” Over 1,400 features on average are being launched by Amazon on a yearly basis. Despite what we hear in the headlines where cloud first companies and the startups of today are absolutely leveraging Lambda out of the gate or containers out of the gate.
There are a whole host of companies that are going through this massive digital disruption trying to compete with these startups. They need a lot of help to reskill their workforce to change the way they think about processes within their organizations between their business development and technology and operations teams. Then ultimately, how do they actually build out a much more agile way of responding to customers? That work requires a company like Rackspace to come and help them navigate through that really large set of features.
There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World
That’s what’s so dynamic about the space. Nobody would have predicted this ten years ago. Even today we’re seeing a ton of momentum with concepts that were very nascent just a few years ago. Kubernetes is a concept where almost every one of our AWS customers at Rackspace, what we call fanatical AWS, are absolutely looking for help on Kubernetes. When we think about Docker a few years ago and Dock Enterprise and we think about Kubernetes and there was that battle, today the battle has been won. Kubernetes is pretty much the de-facto orchestration engine. Nobody would have predicted that a couple of years ago.
Hybrid and multi-cloud are becoming a lot more prevalent. I think even Amazon is very much acknowledging that the big opportunity is in hybrid cloud. If you think about where we are on the technology adoption curve and the trillion dollars of spend that are ultimately going to move, there’s no doubt that it’s a cloud-first world or a destination is the cloud. But the vast majority of the workloads exist in traditional IT. How do we take on that hybrid movement? Outposts is a great acknowledgment of that. Amazon is very aggressively investing and we’re investing with them and helping our customers along their journey effectively.
There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World, Says Rackspace SVP Prashanth Chandasekar
“Customers need in a lot of ways, I hate to say it, but almost an easy button for cloud,” says Matt Liebowitz of Dell Technologies Consulting. “Often when they try to build it themselves, they bring the components together themselves, but it’s really difficult to do that integration work. But this product, Dell Technologies Cloud, is going to help accelerate for us in consulting so that they can quickly get to a state where they have a functional cloud that they can start consuming.”
The most common thing we see from customers when they say I’m doing multi-cloud is they’re actually using more than one cloud. That’s not multi-cloud. You really need to tie it together with a cloud management platform, something that can bring all the pieces together that’s API enabled so that they can programmatically access resources. When customers tell us they’ve got multi-cloud but they’re really consuming something in Azure and something in AWS they’ve just created more IT silos. We’re trying to get away from that. They can use all those clouds but wrap it together in that common control plane so you can understand your estate and actually manage it and consume it.
I think most customers are responding. The needs of the business are changing and they need to respond more quickly so they just consume cloud resources as they can. That often leads to the sprawl. We try to just wrap it together, do an analysis, figure out what’s out there, and help them not only understand where the applications should live but wrap an operating model around it so they can start consuming it properly. They can then understand what they’re going to advertise in their service catalog.
Are You a Digital Laggard or a Digital Leader?
We take what analysts do and we also have our own studies and indexes all the way starting from what we call digital laggards all the way to the digital leaders. What we found is actually most of the customers are either laggards or they’re just starting out. Maybe they’ve made some loose investments but they haven’t walked the path that far. There’s stuff kind of everywhere. Customers don’t often know where to start but I think they’re responding to the needs of the business. I don’t think it’s anything that they’re doing that’s wrong but it’s a little bit of the Wild West for sure.
It’s all about business value and business outcome. The customers who are the most successful have a business reason for what they’re trying to do. They’re not going to public cloud because Gartner said they should, they’re doing it because they know they’re going to get an outcome. They’re going to be able to go into new markets or operate faster and deploy applications faster. Those are the ones that are further down the line. I would say the ones that are the laggards are the ones that are just sort of peeking under the covers of what they should do. They’re just starting out there. They’ve got some workloads in multiple clouds and they need to get a handle on it but they’re just starting.
Customers Need an Easy Button for Cloud
Customers need in a lot of ways, I hate to say it, but almost an easy button for cloud. Often when they try to build it themselves, they bring the components together themselves, but it’s really difficult to do that integration work. I’m in consulting so we’re all about the outcome. But this product, Dell Technologies Cloud, is going to help accelerate for us in consulting so that they can quickly get to a state where they have a functional cloud that they can start consuming. Then we can help them with the day two to actually drive business value, consumption of the cloud and that sort of thing.
We have a framework on how we approach things for multi-cloud and for lots of other things. We use a methodology that we call as-is-to-be where we determine their current state, project where they’re going to be in the future and build a roadmap that’s actually actionable. Then I think what differentiates the methodology is we tie it to a business case. We tie it to an outcome and a financial outcome so that executives and IT leaders can see that this is not just another IT project. They’re going to get true value out of it. We build a roadmap pretty quick, within three to six weeks, that’s actually actionable. We build consensus and that’s how we get started.
Customers Need an Easy Button for Cloud, Says Matt Liebowitz of Dell Technologies
