With the tremendous activity in the cloud-native space these days, IT professionals may find themselves confused by all of the choices coming to market. Application development and deployment technologies are especially hot right now, and two of the biggest players are containers and VMware, Inc.’s services.

“People really obsess around the virtual machines (VM) versus container debate, and I think what we’re seeing is we’re kind of moving past that to some degree,” said Kit Colbert, VP and CTO of cloud-native apps at VMware. Colbert told Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely). cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, “Containers are excellent in terms of packaging and managing — Docker has shown that. But from an operation standpoint and an infrastructure runtime standpoint, I think we’re showing that VMs are really, really powerful.”

Colbert said that the best strategy now might be to combine the best of both worlds.

Slow and steady wins the race

Colbert said that companies should not get too concerned about choosing one product or provider over another right away, because moving to cloud is a journey.

“It’s something that doesn’t happen overnight. It’s something that doesn’t happen for all your apps. You do it selectively, and over time you get to this cloud-native nirvana,” he said.

Mobile’s payday is here

Colbert used food delivery companies as an example of real profit increases companies are seeing through better applications, particularly mobile.

“Domino’s was saying that all orders via mobile are actually 10 to 15 to 20 percent higher. People buy more stuff, bigger pizza,” he said. He said that once companies have an experience like Domino’s with an app, where it’s a big breadwinner, they get hungry to engage more with containers, continuous delivery, and other application technologies.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE