VMware's Gelsinger: 'We are now a billion dollar security business'

CEO unveils new Carbon Black offering and touches upon AI opportunities of new Nvidia partnership at virtual VMworld event

VMware's acquisition of Carbon Black last year has lead it to become a billion dollar security business, stated CEO Pate Gelsinger at the vendor's annual VMworld event.

During his virtual keynote to partners, Gelsinger unveiled Carbon Black Cloud Workload, a solution which is intended to strengthen customers' security posture in their workloads, as well as reducing attack surface.

It can run in virtualised, private and hybrid cloud environments and a free trial will be available to VMware customers for the next six months, he added.

"It's been 14 months since we combined VMware and Carbon Black, and it's a powerful union - security is now a billion dollar plus business for us," he told partners.

"We're thrilled about Carbon Black Cloud Workload; this is a new solution for hardening, configuring and managing your virtual workloads…you can extend this to an unlimited number of machines.

"This is a bad day for cybercriminals; the last piece of the digital foundation is shining the brightest right now."

During his keynote, the chief exec also touched up on the partnership with chip maker Nvidia which was announced at the event. The joint venture will see Nvidia's AI software be integrated into VMware's vSphere, Cloud Foundation and Tanzu offerings.

The vendors claim this venture will help accelerate AI adoption among enterprises, allowing them to extend their existing infrastructure for AI, manage all applications with a single set of operations and deploy AI-ready infrastrcutre across datacentres, the cloud and the edge.

"As exciting as the next generation apps are, they're beyond the reach for mainstream organisations. In fact, enterprise AI adoption is stuck at just 10 to 15 per cent," he claimed.

"All of these new workloads that are coming into the datacentre are going to try to reinvent the markets, demanding more sophisticated applications, cloud native applications, larger datasets, lower bandwidth requirements and lower latency 5G.

"I love the chance of making AI available and democratising every enterprise in the world today - that's our ambition. "