SAN FRANCISCO — SDN and security news took center stage at day two of VMworld as VMware rolled out updates to its NSX networking platform including a load balancer and analytics engine.

In a press conference at the event, company executives said they have nearly doubled the NSX customers count compared to last year. The platform now has 13,000 customers, and 88% of the Fortune 100 companies use NSX, said Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of VMware’s networking and security business unit.

Additionally, eight of the top 10 telcos use NSX, he added. “A new thing for us is this tremendous success in the telco space.”

The NSX updates include a new distributed application delivery controller called NSX Advanced Load Balancer, which is based on Avi Networks’ platform that VMware acquired in June. It provides a software load balancer and intelligent web application firewall, combined with analytics and monitoring. The product’s central control plane and distributed data plane deliver application services as a dynamic, multi-cloud fabric. It intelligently automates decisions and provides application analytics and on-demand elasticity.

“And this is fully software defined,” Gillis said. “This is a modern, purpose-built application controller with no hardware dependencies that can run in any cloud, in the data center, and at the edge.”

The vendor also built a distributed analytics engine into NSX-T called NSX Intelligence. This new VMware analytics engine provides deep insight at the packet level into virtualized and containerized workloads, giving network and application security teams continuous data center-wide visibility.

NSX Intelligence combined with vRealize Network Insight provides visibility, analytics, and troubleshooting to improve network and security operations, Gilles said.

“vRealize Network Insight provides a broad solution so we can measure application performance through the data center all the way out to the edge in a single pane of glass. This is our platform for breadth,” he explained. “NSX Intelligence is out platform for depth. It’s only the data center, only virtual, but it touches every packet.”

While this new tool can help improve security posture, VMware also added more specific security capabilities to NSX-T including a Native Cloud Enforcement mode that allows customers to increase security of public cloud workloads using native cloud security controls. It also achieved FIPS 140-2 compliance, and the platform now has the ability to apply Layer 7 application ID-based or context-aware rules to the NSX edge (gateway) firewall for north-south traffic. Plus, it supports Layer 7 application ID-based distributed firewalling in KVM environments.

VMware also announced a new customer count for its SD-WAN, which is based on the technology it acquired from VeloCloud in late 2017. This service now spans 150,000 branch office locations in more than 130 countries around the world.

Gillis described the VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud architecture as “hyperscale” because he said its automated, scale-out design is public-cloud like. It does this by having thousands of stateless, scalable gateways across every major cloud provider including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and IBM Cloud, as well as hundreds of underlay carrier networks around the world.

This allows customers to add new branch offices and increase application traffic dynamically and automatically without reconfiguration. Customers can also have tens of thousands of edges on a single network. The cloud gateways provide the automated one-click onramp to all the public cloud providers and to VMware Cloud Foundation running in private data centers.

Additionally, VMware and Dell EMC announced a co-branded SD-WAN service powered by VMware’s VeloCloud.