The digital transformation sweeping across many companies has relied on new applications based on microservices distributed across on-premises data centers and public clouds.

But networking needs to catch up to these new applications for that digital transformation to take off in a big way. Will 2017 be the year that software-defined networking finally breaks through?

Milin Desai, vice president of product management for VMware Inc.’s Network and Security Business Unit, believes disaggregated apps are the nuts and bolts of digital transformation. He told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, “They’re running in the public cloud, in the private cloud, maybe in hybrid mode; and so the network and security model needs to align to this disaggregated application.”

Desai explained that the new paradigm requires that everything else in the environment serve the app — the network, security, compute, etc. The conversation was conducted onsite at the VMware campus in Palo Alto, CA, this week as part of an editorial series of interviews intended to find out what’s coming next for the virtualization products maker.

Breaking apart and coming together

The disagregated app also requires human hands to move in sync, not in turn, Desai said, because “it cannot wait for tickets and teams to coordinate and interact in that order.”

He also added: “Roles are transforming. The networking team has to lean in and understand what the application wants to do.”

Honing NSX into networking’s future

Desai believes that VMware’s NSX, VMware’s network virtualization platform for the software-defined data center, will continue innovating virtualized networking to enable modern apps. He stated that the number of NSX production customer deployments has grown from 150 to more than 700 in the last year, with a total customer base of more than 1,900.

Desai added that the company has listened to NSX customer requests and will respond to them going forward. “It’s incumbent on us, when I look at our goals, that we deliver a better service-like experience, better training, better people and process tools for our customers,” Desai said.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE