As he looks ahead to 2021, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said winning at Kubernetes with his company’s Tanzu portfolio and strategy remains top of mind.

“In the coming year, we are going to be super aggressive about Tanzu bundled with vSphere,” Gelsinger said at the recent UBS Global TMT Conference. “We’re going to pave the earth with that Tanzu-vSphere-Kubernetes offering.”

Tanzu is VMware’s Kubernetes platform. In March, VMware added native Kubernetes support to vSphere, which provides the compute virtualization technology for VMware’s cloud software stack. The new vSphere with Tanzu uses Kubernetes as its control plane, and this allows developers and IT teams to use a single platform to manage both legacy workloads built on virtual machines (VMs) and newer, containerized apps.

During VMware’s earnings call last month, Gelsinger said he’s “very pleased” with Tanzu’s third-quarter performance. “It was comfortably ahead of our expectations for the quarter, continues to build momentum,” he added.

Speaking at the investor conference, Gelsinger explained why VMware needs to win developers’ hearts and minds to be successful in the market. “The developer line of business increasingly is setting the decisions or influencing the decisions for infrastructure,” he said. “If we’re not influential there, we’re not influencing the decision.”

At the same time, Tanzu helps customers accelerate their digital transformation efforts because it allows them to run existing workloads on their legacy infrastructure (VMs) while also developing cloud-native applications using the same VMware software stack, Gelsinger said. In on-premises data centers, Tanzu “is magically integrated with vSphere,” he said. “So now you don’t have to choose between VMs and containers.”

Additionally, using vSphere with Tanzu means developers don’t need to rebuild existing applications to run in containers, Gelsinger added. Plus, Tanzu supports all of the major public clouds as well as VMware Cloud on AWS, and its Mission Control product facilitates centralized multicloud Kubernetes management.

“We’re not just saying it’s the modern app environment, but it’s the modern, multicloud, hybrid-cloud application environment that they're building too for the future. And that’s exactly what Tanzu is all about,” Gelsinger said. “We’ve brought together the Pivotal, Heptio, and VMware assets into a singular portfolio that now is multicloud. You can run private cloud as well as we’ve done the releases now of that for Amazon, Azure, and Google. So it’s truly multicloud.”