This year’s VMworld gave the Wikibon Inc. Research Team plenty of information to mull over this week. They found this year’s event to have a strong, coherent message detailing VMware Inc.’s transitioning cloud market direction evolving virtualization from cloud to edge.

“I think that the next five years, VMware is going to be one of the companies that shapes the future of the cloud,” said Peter Burris (@plburris, pictured, far right), Wikibon analyst and host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “I don’t think we would have said that a couple of years ago.”

Burris, along with Wikibon analysts James Kobielus (@jameskobielus, pictured, left) and David Floyer (@dfloyer, pictured, center) spoke during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed how VMware is making the most of strong partnerships, as well as why they’re impressed with VMware NSX, the company’s network virtualization platform for the software-defined data center. (* Disclosure below.)

Great partnerships, strategic acquisitions, and why NSX is a ‘crown jewel’

One area where the Wikibon analysts suggested VMware consider changing its thinking is how the company perceives information technology. Right now, it’s a view from the edge, and it’s a view from the top down, the analysts explained. They don’t see this as a winning strategy because the world is moving more toward devices and sensors.

“The job of IT will be to integrate those devices.” Floyer said. “It won’t be those devices taking on the standards of IT; it will be IT that has to shape itself to look after all those devices.”

The partnerships that VMware has formed, especially the Relational Database Service with Amazon, impressed the analysts. However, one of the big gaps the analysts perceived was a lack of a strong artificial intelligence play. While VMware does have Project Magna, which brings AI to virtual infrastructure, it’s in the beginning stages and has yet to be a strong contender, according to Kobielus.

“I think what’s going to happen is that VMware/Dell Technologies … are going to have to make strategic acquisitions of AI solution providers to build up that capability, because that’s going to be fundamental to their ability to manage this complex multicloud fabric from end-to-end, continuously,” Kobielus stated. “They need that competency, and that can’t be simply a partner [who is] providing, that’s got to be [one of] their core competencies.”

The analysts were impressed with VMware’s NSX platform. It was referred to as “the very special crown jewel,” according to Burris.

“This notion of hybrid cloud … extended cloud is predicated on the idea that I also have a network that can naturally and easily not just bridge, but truly multi-network, interoperate, internetwork with a lot of different cloud sources, but also a lot of different cloud locations,” Burris said. “And there’s not a lot of technologies out there that are great candidates to do that.”

When assessing NSX, Burris wondered if it will be a new TCP/IP for the cloud. It will still run over the internet, but now it’s possible to have greater visibility into jobs, workloads, management infrastructures, data locations, data placement, and predictive movement. “NSX is going to be at the vanguard of showing how that’s going to work,” Burris concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference.  (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored coverage of VMworld, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE