The majority of conversations around migrating to the cloud focus on what is conserved — time, expense and effort spent on hardware and infrastructure maintenance. What an organization gains in turn is a less chattered-about but nonetheless exciting topic. As more enterprises work out the pains of moving to cloud and get established there, they will find they suddenly have elbow room for application development on previously undreamed of levels.

Ajay Patel, SVP and GM at VMware, Inc., said that a shift in priorities is happening at businesses all over; they want to get out of the data center business and reallocate time and talent farther up the stack. “When they do that, they first want to move to a public cloud,” Patel told John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016. “And then they’re saying, ‘Let me add new applications with containers, cloud service, etc.'”

He added that in this new IT economy, “Cloud is the new hardware.”

Star treatment for apps

Patel stated that at the typical enterprise, less than 10 percent of the budget goes to application development “unless you’re Netflix or Uber, and that is you’re business.”

He agreed with Furrier that when the focus on the data center is moved to applications, a spurt in app development will emerge reminiscent of the mobile app explosion enabled by Android and iOS.

Better together

“I don’t think we’re a developer company,” Patel conceded. He said that VMware will have a role in the new application surge through its partnering ecosystem.

He mentioned that IBM Bluemix is a top development cloud platform running VMware.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE