SAN FRANCISCO – Digital transformations and cloud migrations have a lot to do with the technology side of things, but an organization's understanding of the true value and purpose behind moving to the cloud plays just an important role in the success or failure of those efforts, according to VMware Tanzu SVP Edward Hieatt.

VMware talks a lot about its products and the competitive marketplace, but the backbone of the vendor's multi-cloud push is focused on selling the vision of a future built on the cloud and the accompanying shift in culture.

"That kind of behavior shift, that cultural shift, honestly ends up being most of the work to help a company transform," Hieatt told SDxCentral.

Across the industry more broadly, the fact that enterprises migrating to the cloud need to pay attention to culture and how it might evolve is usually mentioned, "but no one says what it actually means," he said.

To that point, Hieatt stressed VMware's emphasis on building boilerplates and templates and to help legacy customers adopt "all this stuff" associated with a digital transformation. "To me, that's the make or break. The products are great, but are they going to be used as intended?"

He explained VMware is focused on "positioning to a customer a vision of what the future could be and how great it can be" with the cloud. Customers typically buy into that vision, and it's solved many of their problems.

But there are often still gaps in a migrating organization's culture in terms of understanding the real purpose and value behind using the cloud. "That vision we're all painting at conferences ... as a sales pitch to a customer, requires a different culture [and] a different behavior for many roles than they have had in the past," Hieatt explained.

"How do you get that culture shift to actually happen? Because honestly if you don't have it happen, this is all kind of futile. And often these things stall out because it doesn't happen, or rather, we retreat from that vision down to some very pale imitation of it," he warned.

His team's efforts in this area include demonstrating to customers what it looks like and feels like to run a cloud platform. And for developers, it's demonstrating the modern techniques they need to build great software. "We're more modeling behavior," he said, which adds more value than simply explaining how to use Kubernetes, for example. "That should be more in our minds as an industry," he added.

CIOs, for example, who are years into their organization's cloud migrations, often report that it's going a bit slower than they'd hoped. The reality has "ended up being just get it on cloud somehow, some way, because the board of directors wants to know you've done it. Get to cloud. And if I say to them, Well, what are you gonna get out of it?" They don't really know why they're doing this anymore, Hieatt explained.

Without a holistic transformative effort that includes the culture of the organization, "you end up with these results that are pale imitations of what you're shooting for in the first place. ... And ultimately it affects the end user not really getting the excellent software that can be developed in the cloud," he said.

To that point, enterprises should be "accelerating the DevOps and app dev culture toward what a startup might look like today down the street from here," and they need to "invest in that cultural change and have a model to point at. Give it time to steep and form itself and be supported and be disciplined around it," Hieatt said.

After all, there's a reason VMware Explore was just a lot of people talking about cloud all day. "It's a much better or effective operating model for delivering software. It isn't a place to get because you should be there, which is what it can be," he said.

Read all of SDxCentral’s VMware Explore 2022 coverage here.