VMware sees a “massive” opportunity for its Kubernetes-based Tanzu portfolio, CEO Raghu Raghuram said during a virtual question-and-answer session.

But he hedged when asked if and when Tanzu will overtake the hypervisor in terms of revenue for VMware.

“Tanzu is a very fundamental part of our portfolio. And it’s a very exciting part of the portfolio,” he said during the event marking his 100 days as CEO. “The growth opportunity for Tanzu is just the growth opportunity for applications as a whole — it’s massive.”

Every time a developer writes a new application using Tanzu, “it needs to land on some piece of infrastructure,” Raghuram said. This could be on a public cloud providers’ infrastructure, or on VMware’s hypervisor.

“We think the VMware hypervisor will turn out to be the best infrastructure for modern applications,” he added. “So I expect the growth of modern applications to benefit both.”

This isn’t a new line for VMware. It sounds a lot like its answer to the containers-or-virtual-machines (VMs) question that the virtualization giant used to field with this response: The best place to deploy containers is in VMs.

But then, starting in 2018, VMware bought a trio of Kubernetes and developer-focused startups to build its modern application line. And even as Tanzu now represents one of the three pillars of VMware’s multicloud strategy, the virtualization giant remains bullish on hypervisors.

Tanzu gives VMware an inroad with developers, and VMware remains the No. 2 contributor to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Raghuram added.

“Historically, our conversations have been starting from IT and working our way to the CIO, but if you got to be relevant in this multicloud and the digital transformation that our customers are going through, that conversation is increasingly starts from the line of business, and the enterprise architects, and the developers,” he said, noting VMware’s Pivotal and Heptio acquisitions.

Heptio, in particular, is significant to VMware’s CNCF contributions because its founders – Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie – were on the original Kubernetes development team while at Google. Now they are both VMware execs, and they remain active in the Kubernetes community.

Similarly, via its Pivotal acquisition, VMware landed the Spring application framework and access to that developer community.

“Every day, over 5 million developers touch a piece of software for which we are the stewards,” Raghuram said. “So yes, that is definitely a growing focus for us.”

VMware isn’t alone in this hybrid-cloud pursuit. IBM paid $34 billion for Red Hat and its OpenShift Kubernetes platform in 2019. And a year later, Hewlett Packard Enterprise rolled out its Ezmeral software brand that competes against Tanzu and OpenShift.

More recently, Nutanix announced a partnership with Red Hat that targets companies that want to build and manage cloud-native applications on premises and in hybrid clouds.

In an interview with SDxCentral earlier this month, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami, who used to be a top VMware exec, said this partnership illustrates another example of modern workloads running on Nutanix’s core platform.

“Cloud native is a pretty substantial area,” he said. “Rather than trying to build a full stack ourselves, we felt there’s a lot of value in bringing together the industry-leading, cloud-native stack, Red Hat.”

This partnership is still in its early days, so it’s too soon to tell how it will compete against VMware, but Ramaswami said both vendors are beginning to jointly add customers.