SAN FRANCISCO – VMware says its Aria portfolio for multicloud management will render the boring parts of cloud management invisible to enterprises that adopt the technology suite.

“Once it becomes mainstream, it becomes boring. You should not be wasting your time doing that. Let us take it and make it invisible,” VMware Cloud Management SVP and GM Purnima Padmanabhan told SDxCentral during an interview at VMware Explore 2022.

Every company today is a software company, she said, and developers should be focused on writing applications and software, not on writing code just to manage the environment.

“Anything that's below the waterline that's not about applications, give it to us so that we can take care of managing that complexity. That's our long-term vision,” Padmanabhan explained.

And while Aria is entering into a competitive market space, VMware's goal isn't to overpower cloud management options from rivals. “I'm not coming and saying replace AWS' insufficient management tools with mine,” she said.

In fact, Aria is designed around the idea that enterprises will want to pick and choose various tools from different vendors.

“The assumption is not that [VMware is] the domain expert in everything, but once we have a single understanding of the truth, we can federate information from whatever domain you want,” like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or third-party cloud management tools, for example. “But still you get the full picture from VMware,” she added, highlighting a major differentiator for the virtualization giant.

She noted some enterprises probably already have specific management tools they feel sufficiently address a certain domain like cloud cost, but using those tools disparately adds unnecessary complexity. “To understand the information about your application, are you going to log on to five different consoles?”

To that point, Padmanabhan noted the vendor's current challenge with its Aria portfolio is awareness. “The first challenge is getting the message out that if you're looking to manage multiple cloud environments, VMware Aria is there to do management,” Padmanabhan said.

To provide that management, customers need to prioritize the problems they need solved and identify the aspects of the Aria portfolio best-suited to resolve those issues. “Start from the problem statement rather than the solution,” she explained.

Take the common problem of developers building applications across multiple different clouds, for example, creating what the vendor dubs cloud chaos.

“If you have that problem, come to Aria, and we can help automate the creation of these multicloud environments,” Padmanabhan said. She highlighted Aria's ongoing automation in contrast to other cloud management tools' one-time automation of multicloud environments.

“Not only can we automate it initially, but we can put guardrails and policies around it so that it stays compliant to your corporate guidelines,” she explained. “But at the same time, the developers can be free to develop on top of it. So really, it's giving the best of both worlds.”

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