Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, Tanzu, the latter’s cloud-native application development software suite, remains relatively unscathed.

“When VMware got acquired, the Tanzu portfolio – which is all about accelerating modern applications for [customers] – was formed as a separate division within Broadcom,” VP and GM of Broadcom’s Tanzu Division Purnima Padmanabhan said. “We continue to invest in this area,” she said in a strategy update.

Tanzu is used in thousands of Kubernetes environments to manage billions of dollars in cloud spending and exabytes of customer data. “We have millions of apps today running on Tanzu platform – not merely packaged apps, but custom apps [and] mission critical apps across various industries,” Padmanabhan said.

All companies today are software companies. And business innovation is possible only through successful deployment of software. “When you talk about software velocity, the difference between leaders and laggards is spectacular,” she said.

Leaders release new software between 4,000 and 18,000 times each year. Laggards, on the other hand, are lucky to release software four times per year. “You can imagine the difference in the pace of innovation,” she pointed out. “In search of this agility, many of our customers are investing in different technologies – open source, Kubernetes, public cloud – but accelerating is not easy.”

A main differentiator of VMware by Broadcom’s application modernization portfolio is the way it simplifies the process of accelerating software delivery. Tanzu is made up of a myriad of tools and technologies, but all the developer sees is a set of commands that let them build an application and manage it across multiple environments.

Tanzu also helps platform engineering teams operate their applications with efficiency in terms of stability, security, scale, performance and cost. “Tanzu allows you to develop, operate and optimize your applications at scale across VMs, Kubernetes and public cloud as well as private cloud,” she said.

When tasked with putting out a new application, the developer builds the business logic and then hands that over to Tanzu, which builds a secure container with the right dependencies and CVEs. The developer can then bind any external services to the application, like data services, public cloud services or artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (machine learning) services, before delivering the application to the environment of choice.

After the application is delivered, Tanzu automatically maintains the CVEs, monitoring, log rotation and credentials – “all the boring stuff that often grinds operations to a halt,” Padmanabhan said. Once the application is deployed, Tanzu continues monitoring and measuring to ensure constant optimization.

In other words, developers using Tanzu can make choices based on intent – if they want to use a certain language or encryption or hyperscale cloud service provider. “Let them make all those choices. But the platform can still be stitched together in a way that it enforces the enterprise best practices and guidelines,” she said. “That is the Tanzu unified platform experience.”