The reason Paul Strong joined VMware in 2010 was because the challenge the company was trying to solve was interesting to him. That challenge was (and still is) to create a platform for users to run and manage applications throughout their entire life cycles.

A traditional application life cycle, from an IT resource management perspective, starts with mapping the application onto the resources, provisioning it, running it, monitoring it, reconciling it with policies and producing business metrics as an output. Today, with a wide variety of infrastructure types and services, managing this life cycle is a complicated job.

There is no way around the complexity, but VMware wants to abstract it, Strong, the company's acting CTO, says. The complexity will stay, but it will be hidden as far as the IT manager or the application – especially the application – are concerned.

That is what has been driving the company's R&D and acquisition agenda. “We're investing massively in tools that enable provisioning the automatic deployment of apps onto infrastructure,” Strong says. Key product in this area is vCloud Automation Center, a system that enables things like self-service provisioning, standing up cloud infrastructure and policy-based governance, among other things.

VMware's R&D dollars are also focused on divorcing the application from the network and storage infrastructure. Bringing this together with vCloud Automation Center and rounding everything out with vCenter Operations Manager for monitoring is what will allow the company to close the loop of application life cycle management.

“And that's what excites me, because now we're treating the life cycle of an application holistically,” Strong says. “To me that is to some degree the Holly Grail.”

VMware views this separation of application from the infrastructure as putting applications in “containers”. The virtual machine (VM) was a container for a hypervisor, but the company is now expanding that concept to networking. “Now we've also got the network virtualization container as well that we're building following the acquisition of Nicira,” he says, referring to the massive US$1.05bn acquisition of the software defined networking (SDN) firm in 2012.

An application will ultimately live in a container that will abstract all the complexities of the infrastructure underneath, automating provisioning of the IT resources to the application's requirements.

SDN a priority

While VMware is still expending energy on making vSphere, the hypervisor, more robust and scalable to stay ahead of the competition in this area, most of the efforts today are focused on the network. “It's where our customers have the largest problems,” Strong says.

You can now flip VMs on and off almost instantly, but if you want to deploy a network-distributed application, you have to “re-IP” it, reconfigure load ballancers, firewalls, etc. “The network stuff becomes highly problematic and turns deployment times from second and minutes literally into hours, days and weeks.”

Cisco's play is short-sighted

Seeing companies like VMware and other players in the SDN space now trying to eat its lunch, networking giant Cisco took a markedly different approach to SDN. Instead of going the route of decoupling network management software from the network equipment, the company announced in November a technology that, while automating network configuration for the application, keeps that automation functionality embedded in the switches.

In Strong's opinion, Cisco's strategy, while understandable from a business perspective, seems to be going against the long-term trend of separating the network management functionality in a layer of software. Companies are seeing value in a flatter and simpler infrastructure with complexity handled by software. Cisco's differentiation is in understanding networking, Strong says. The company is leverage that differentiation through software but has chosen to embed that software in its hardware products. “It's a packaging choice,” he says.

In the long term, however, that choice may prove to be an unsuccessful one. There is the historical example of what happened in the world of compute, Strong says. Big, vertically integrated systems of the past have slowly but surely been overrun by vast hordes of x86 servers. The industry got rid of silos and got great flexibility and efficiency as a result. “And I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation to say that is beginning to happen in the networking space,” Stong says.

Abstracting storage

Another area VMware is focusing on in furthering its software defined data center vision is storage. The idea, here, is similar to SDN: present storage to the application as an array it can use, regardless of what the storage infrastructure actually consists of, be it large arrays or VMware's Virtual SAN, which is exactly what it sounds like. The company's acquisition earlier this year of Virsto, which gave it a storage management model that accelerates any block-based storage system and was designed to work with virtualized environments.

Fewer vendors, but not one vendor

While VMware's vision seems to be where its technology is managing all aspects of the infrastructure that serves applications, Strong says the company has no expectations that it will eventually be the only player in this space. It is enabling its tools, such as the vCloud Automation Center, to manage competitors' hypervisors and to manage applications living in non-VMware clouds.

A lot of the economies the cloud has delivered is removal of diversity, Strong says. “That doesn't mean you have to have one vendor for everything, but it means you don't want 20.”

A version of this article first appeared in the latest issue of our magazine. Go to the DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine webpage to read the digital edition or to for a free subscription to the print edition.