VMware on Carbon Black plans as Dell crowns it preferred security vendor
Sanjay Poonen gives 'sneak peek' of VMware's plans for Carbon Black at VMworld in Barcelona
VMware's acquisition of Carbon Black will allow it to do things that "have never been done before" in cybersecurity, COO Sanjay Poonen declared at its annual VMworld event.
Speaking at the opening keynote of the vendor's event in Barcelona, Poonen (pictured) gave the audience a sneak peek of what it plans to do with Carbon Black's capabilities to help it make its core vSphere offering "agentless".
"We can take Carbon Black and layer it into vSphere and make it agentless," he explained to the assembled audience.
"That's been the dream - why have an agent when you've got VMTools and key capabilities that will allow us to put Carbon Black into vSphere?
"We began that process with AppDefense, but we can take it even a step further and that will come soon to you. What we are doing has never been done before by any antivirus vendor doing signature-based AV - we will make it agentless for the first time."
The Carbon Black deal closed last month. When it was first announced in the summer, it was met with scepticism by some analysts in the industry.
Neither Poonen nor CEO Pat Gelsinger seemed anything less than evangelistic about what folding the security vendor's offerings into the VMware family means for VMware and its ecosystem.
"Gradually VMware started building a fairly large security portfolio… and now we're kind of like a big unknown [in] vendor security," he stated.
"The security industry is fundamentally broken. There are some analogies between security and healthcare.
"When you think about healthcare, the reason you don't have to pop 5,000 tablets every week is that you make your healthcare intrinsic to what you do every day.
"And that's what we saw had to be done; intrinsic security built into every aspect of the layer of that gate - into the infrastructure layer, the cloud infrastructure layer, the application layer and the device layer.
"That's what we've been focused on because the paradigm had to be changed from traditional security that is bolted on, disparate, often not very intelligent and often reactive to something that is more intrinsically built in, where all the security is built into the infrastructure, is driven by AI and is proactive rather than reactive."
It was also announced during the opening session that VMware's parent company Dell has made Carbon Black its chosen end-point security solution of choice - along with Dell Trusted Devices and Secureworks - for its commercial customers.
Poonen called this move a "game-changer" and encouraged its partners and customers to follow Dell's lead in this regard, stating that VMware would soon have the same reputation in the security industry as it does in networking.
"Seven years ago, VMware was not even considered a networking vendor," he declared.
"Now I would argue we are one of two companies doing some phenomenal things in networking and I believe the same thing is going to start happening in security. We're going to build on this and you're going to see much more innovation from us."