VMware’s Future Is Networking, CEO Pat Gelsinger Says

The company’s NSX networking portfolio boosted the company’s first quarter fiscal 2019 revenue, which grew 14 percent year over year to $2.01 billion. License bookings for NSX products grew more than 30 percent, and all 10 of the quarter’s top deals included NSX. At last year’s VMworld conference Gelsinger predicted “what vSphere was to the first 20 years of VMware, NSX is to the next decade or two.” And on yesterday’s earnings call with investors, Gelsinger again said he expects the networking piece of VMware’s business to grow even bigger than compute. NSX Networking Portfolio During the quarter the company added several new networking products and features, and it changed the name of its original networking offering — NSX — to NSX Data Center. This product also added support for containerized cloud-native and bare metal applications. Additionally, VMware expanded NSX Cloud capabilities. This is the company’s  software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that supports vSphere-private clouds, native Amazon Web Services (AWS) workloads, VMware Cloud on AWS, and now also Microsoft Azure. It also added NSX SD-WAN, which includes the SD-WAN technology VMware acquired when it bought VeloCloud last year. NSX SD-WAN integrates with NSX Data Center and NSX Cloud. And it added NSX Hybrid Connect to provide cloud migration capabilities and consistent networking across hybrid cloud environments.