Well, why don't you introduce yourself? My name is Ramya Sarindarajan. I am the Director of Product Marketing for the Marketplace Portfolio Products, which includes the VMware Marketplace, the NAMI Application Catalog, and VMware Application Catalog, or what is today known as the Townsville Application Catalog. They're all very related. And what are those components and what's the idea of how they fit together? So at VMware, we announced a whole bunch of capabilities with the Marketplace. So it sort of adds a lot more to what we already have. But let me start at the basic level. So VMware Marketplace enables our customers to discover, try, purchase, and ecosystem solutions to VMware endpoints. Think of it as a one-stop shop for our customers to find compatible, validated, and certified solutions from our ISP partners, as well as open-source solutions. Now, Tanzu Application Catalog is an evolution of the Marketplace where we package and curate solutions we use within a specific enterprise based on their specific. For example, let's say if a company requires certain vulnerability scans to be performed on the software they use, we ensure that those scans are performed based on the golden image they provide us. And all subsequent updates of that software also have that scan performed, and we make it available for their enterprise customers, for their enterprise users within the company. Currently, Marketplace is both open-source and ISP solutions, as I mentioned. Tanzu Application Catalog will be applicable only to container, which we plan to expand to ISP solutions and virtual machine formats. Hence, my initial introduction of the product as VMware Application Catalog and not Tanzu Application. Now, the third fork of this is the Bitnami Application Catalog. And think of the Bitnami Application Catalog as a feeder to the VMware Marketplace. Now, obviously, Bitnami Application Catalog was acquired through the acquisition of Bitnami Inc. a couple of years back. And what Bitnami does and what it has done is really perfected the art of packaging open-source solutions. So that catalog is still a feeder to the VMware market. Developers can come to bitnami.com, fetch open-source solutions,
2:01not just for use within VMware endpoints, but also in public clouds. So that's how the three, I would say, the folks of the product portfolio interplay and talk to each other. There's a lot of work that's put into packaging these things and making the various components ready to use. And, you know, as you were saying, not only in general, as you see in the general marketplace, but when it comes to, I guess, I mean, I assume kind of like the policies and the desires that various companies would have, they can even customize that packaging, you know, like with the Tanzu Catalog and other things. And kind of get more control over that catalog and what people can pick from it rather than, well, I guess, what's the alternative? Correct. Often enough, you know, and this is where, you know, the enterprises are trying to strike a balance between what freedom they want to provide to developers and obviously the IT prescribed policies that developers have to follow, right? And often enough, you want to give your developers the largest portfolio to use because you have specific application needs. You have very specific, you know, outcomes that you're trying to drive and you want them to be able to use not just ISV solutions that you've procured, but the huge array of open source solutions available to be in, you know, in the world. And I call it the dark internet, right? You have so much out there. But what is key here is getting developers to obviously innovate and use tools that they need, but also ensure that it's compliant, it's governance. I mean, just the number of issues we face with security today is profound, right? And enterprises are spending a lot of money, time, energy, and resources in ensuring that these aspects are followed across the board within various groups that are involved in application development or in maintaining. And so the goal really with the marketplace portfolio of products within VMware is if you are looking at open source solutions, if you're looking at ISV solutions, because the marketplace allows you to, you know, fetch what you want. But with the Tanzu application catalog, which is today focused on packaging open source solutions for developers based on the golden image that an enterprise needs,
4:06you can at least be assured that it is compliant. It is in tune with IT policies set forth such that you're balancing both the flexibility you're giving to your developers, as well as the governance needs set forth by the IT. So this is where we sort of are trying to establish our, you know, give our customers the capability of being able to, within the realms of governance that is set forth by the enterprise. We keep talking about developers and like it, that fits in. I mean, this fits in as, as if you were to look at the map of, you know, in the overall VMware and also the, the, the VMware Tanzu world, kind of this, this focus on like not only developers, developers is the shorthand that we use, you know, as we were just doing, we talk about our, our, what we're doing and the customers we're working with and the products and services that we're doing. But I think of it a lot more as just like organizations that write their own software, helping people with their own software developers are a major part of that. And you know, that seems to be like, if, if, if people saw a lot of the stuff we went over at VM world last week, a lot of it is geared towards that to use the older word for it workload, like, like that idea of you have all this software that runs your business. And I mean, I think, I think the way you went over, it kind of explains how, you know, it's a vital part of what we would call the supply chain. I think that's, that's, that's one of the fun ways people refer to it nowadays. And so as, as, as y'all are like putting together, you know, as you put together this portfolio and you're thinking about, about the future of it, like how, how is it fitting in to like that strategy, that idea of here's the toolkit, the toolbox you have as a large organization to handle all those, the, the developer needs that you have, like what role is it filling? Yeah, no, I think you bring up the marketplace as such serves all users of VMware products today, from developers and DevOps managers to IT admins, database admins, security admins, to even business users. And at the core of it is the transformation that we're seeing within enterprises, right?
6:06There's every company is a digital company today. And so the goal is to really focus on all users who touch, manage, build software with enterprises. So yeah, at the core of it, as I mentioned, it's to enable our users to build, manage and run their applications on any cloud and provide a truly multi-cloud experience that, you know, our company is trying to serve. And while we have a robust portfolio of products ourselves, we also focus on building the strong ecosystem of interoperable third party open source solutions to help our users across the site. So the marketplace provides this diverse user base with a broad set of ecosystem tools, third party open source, and even some across multiple formats and categories such that our users can pick and choose the right solutions for their specific needs. Specifically talking about what we are planning on doing in future and how we are planning on expanding this. So I spoke to you about, you know, the VMware Application Catalog, which is an evolution of the Tanzu Application Catalog, which today serves our users with containers, which are packaged based on enterprise needs, and it's focused on open source. So our goal over the course of the next few quarters is to expand this to also address VM-based formats, native public formats, including formats such as Armies, which is Amazon Machine Images, as well as use this capability to package ISV solutions, because often enough, companies want to fetch their building blocks or their tools, as you mentioned, you know, parts of the supply chain pieces from one repo. And so the goal is to also extend this to ISV components. The third focus of this is a new capability that we are trying to introduce called the VMware Image Builder Service. Often enough, you have a custom code that is being developed within enterprises, and enterprises, again, want these to be packaged, assembled based on their specific, you know, set for policies. And so we are planning on introducing this capability where enterprises can come in, you know, you could have ISV, you could have, you know, individual digital teams come in and give us their custom code, which we will package based on the code, which we will package based on the code. So that's the expansion plan in terms of what we have today with the marketplace and Townsville application catalog, but evolving that VMware application catalog, as well as having this image builder service.
8:14One last piece I want to mention here is also the fact that today the VMware marketplace does a pretty eloquent job in targeting VMware endpoints, but we do understand that customers are going to multiple clouds, right? And they want to have a multi-cloud experience or build their applications on multiple clouds based on the specific application that they are trying to execute. And for this specific purpose, we are looking at enabling marketplace to help deploy applications on multiple clouds, multiple endpoints, and really make this a true cross-cloud marketplace such that you can come in and fetch an application that you want to deploy to any cloud, even native public clouds, so that you can give developers ultimate freedom of where they want to build and what they want to build. Yeah, I mean, that brings up the age-old tension between, I guess, developers and everyone else in IT, which is like, you know, you always, you always want, well, I should never say always, but always minus one. You always want your developers to be able to do whatever is necessary, like to do interesting new things and not be hampered. On the other hand, like once you have them doing too much of their own thing, then it becomes like a management problem. Not only like applying policies and things like that, but I always like to remind people that like, you know, it's one thing if you've got like a handful of developers or just like five teams of developers, but if you have like 20,000 developers, you're effectively, all that variation is going to cause a lot of problems across there. And so I think, you know, there's always this constant problem of, again, it's always like this dichotomy of benefit problem, if you will. But there's so many, like there's so many great, like whether it's open source or closed source or services that are out there, there's so many great things that developers can use to just make their applications better. And, you know, you don't want to slow them down too much by putting a lot of governance and restrictions on there, because then you're kind of cutting yourself off from innovation and new ways of doing things.
10:14But on the other hand, you can't just have developers doing whatever they want. So there's always the need to have some kind of centralized way of packaging and controlling these components that developers are using. And it certainly is, it's certainly better to do it earlier in the process rather than afterwards, rather than auditing, essentially. Absolutely. And that's the reason we are on this journey of providing this freedom with the balance of governance that you spoke about to users with the Tanzu application catalog. Often enough, we see open source, you know, solutions can be picked off anywhere from the wild, wild internet. And obviously, you are susceptible of introducing vulnerabilities that you didn't even think of as an IT organization. And yes, IT teams are being responsive, right? That's one of the reasons why they are working on these golden images, where they constantly keep these images updated to ensure that all the applications used in such large organizations that you spoke about, right? The 20,000 developer organizations are at least, to a certain extent, safe. Again, security, I wouldn't minimize the problem at all, because it's always an issue. It's always going to be a challenge. And, you know, it's something that IT teams have to constantly wait on and respond to. But I think at least having, you know, package that I can come to where, hey, I am having access to 200 open source solutions today, right? Which is packaged based on my specific needs, is, I think, somewhat of an assurance. Granted, there is going to be always those vulnerabilities that you have. But that's what we're trying to achieve with the... In addition, we also mandate validation and certification for all our deployable assets. What this means is, you know, our ISV providers specifically have to go through validation and certification and give them badges depending on whether they have the validation themselves or we have conducted it for them. And that way, at least, another point of assurance to IT and development teams is this will work given conditions on specific endpoints.
12:14We also do this for informational listings, right, where folks perhaps don't have bids on the marketplace, but have gone through the validation certification program, have metadata and support data on the marketplace. We enable ISVs to display their certification badge, again, such that development teams as well as IT teams and operators and, you know, generally the digital teams are aware of the fact that these ISVs have gone through a certain level of betting and validation. So, yeah, some of the things that we are trying to do is to address this tension, as you mentioned, between innovation, as we call it, and freedom and government. Yeah, and, you know, you, a little while ago, you mentioned one of the things that I've, you know, over the years always noticed if you want to, well, if you want to be in the business of developer tooling, as we are, one of the things early on that you have to realize and actually, I don't know, a principle you have to believe, as you were saying, is you have to be very open. And, and as we used to say, heterogeneous, you know, run on in whatever environments and integrate with whatever might come along. It's just the more, the more closed in the sense of not just like opacity, if you will, but also in the sense of works with or integrates with other things that you are, the harder it is to have appeal with developers who are always, I don't know. I mean, as a former developer myself, I always think we like to flit around and like look at new things. So always having lots of options is nice. And I think, I think, I think that, you know, the, the sheer volume of things and making things easier to access is when it comes to, you know, a catalog or marketplace like this, what appeals to developers, right? As, as, as, as one, as one person phrased it recently, like making the right thing easy instead of the right thing hard, right? Because the, the wrong thing for a developer is often the easiest thing. So it's, it's, it's, it's going to focus on making the right thing, uh, the, uh, the easy thing. Yep. Absolutely. We've mentioned like a few personas here and there. Right. And I think, I think, you know, one of them as, as we were just talking about is like the, the, the developers, right?
14:17Like what, what their, their benefits are and their goals and why it helps them out. Right. And then we kind of went over the, let's call it the governance people, the, the operations people, the security people, but also like the compliance and enterprise architect people where, uh, you know, I, I saw, I saw someone using the phrase enterprise architect the other day, and it was kind of like shocking. And, you know, they're, they were in the whole, like Kubernetes DevOps, like container, cool person world of stuff. Right. And it was just this idea of like, Ooh, enterprise architects, someone, someone's decided we can use that phrase again. And they're not some weird, scary role over there, but to that. And I think there's a lot to be said of the, if an enterprise architect kind of, kind of, you know, related to what we're talking about here is focused on the productivity of the organization of the whole. They have a huge amount of benefits that they can bring that role to an organization, as opposed to just like, you know, uh, as someone said to me, you know, said it several years ago, they, uh, enterprise architects who focus on policing are kind of a bummer instead of enabling and partnering. So anyhow, so, I mean, we have those kinds of personas and there's another one that, that you've mentioned several times, uh, that, you know, I think it's worth going into as well, which is the, um, well, I don't, I don't know what you would call them, but the, the third parties, the, the ISVs are from a VMware perspective, the partners who are putting things in there. And like, what, uh, what's their role in this? Like, how do they, I don't know what, what, why do they care? Yeah, no, that's a great question. All along, VMware has been known as the Switzerland of partnerships, right? Everybody, because we made it easier for our partners to work with us. Um, and our goal has to build, has been always to build a strong ecosystem of solutions because we are, I think a very self-aware company and we know that we don't provide everything to all user types across the entire stack. So we are well aware of that and we understand the need to build these strong partnerships with, um, independent software vendors who can complement our platform, who can augment our platforms and at the same time, uh, you know, deliver better value together. So, you know, the point that you mentioned, right, our goal is to serve our customers effectively across all persona types.
16:17And I mentioned some of them, right? Developer DevOps, which we've spoken about extensively today, ID admins, security admins, cloud admins, et cetera. And, you know, our partners are critical in this journey to serve these diverse persona types. Uh, and so the marketplace is that vehicle that we evolve and we also see it being used today to a large extent to craft this better together experience for our partners, sorry, for our customers. Partners that publish, uh, solutions in marketplace can enjoy many benefits. Um, you know, obviously they get access to our customer base and, you know, have a way to serve them with VMware and, um, and it's an easy way for them to, uh, understand the interest for their specific product on VMware platforms and, um, ensure that they're able to easily reach this customer. Let's say, let's say, let's say, I know I spoke, spoke about developer DevOps, but let's talk about, let's say, DR, right? If somebody is looking at backup and to come, right, which is an IT admin, sort of the policing piece that you mentioned, right? So we have, uh, partners with solutions on the marketplace, um, that can reach the specific IT admin who is worried about, uh, these, uh, aspects. Uh, we also help our partners with validating and certifying their solutions to ensure that they work, um, on customer environments, right? The last thing we want for our partners and for our customers to get into a situation where they do use a product from the marketplace or a solution, which is from the ecosystem, but we see that it doesn't work given certain parameters. And so that is where our certification validation programs come in play. And we have a huge, uh, portfolio of these to ensure that we are addressing the use cases that are, um, required within, uh, within, within our use, within our customer environment. Um, and publishing a solution of the marketplace is, is pretty straightforward. Again, we try to make this as easy as possible, uh, partners need to be a part of our technology alliance program, which is almost our umbrella program for anybody to be aware in any capacity. Then they go through this validation certification program. Again, we handhold them in some cases, provide them the right environments for them to undergo this certification validation. And it's fairly a quick process, like two or three days at max sometimes to ensure that your solution is validated and certified and given the amount.
18:21After that, they use our automated and self-published flow through the marketplace to submit. And we're going to be able to do that. And we're going to be able to do that. And we're going to be able to do that. And we're going to be able to do that. And we're going to be able to do that. And we're going to be able to do that. And we're going to be able to do that. And we're going to be able to do that. And we're going to be able to do that. And we're going to be able to do that. As I mentioned, it's a very important capability and effort on our side, at least, to ensure that our ecosystem solutions are presented as a whole via the marketplace to our customers, such that, again, in the spirit of developers, our DevOps admins, our IT admins, our entire user base, all the tools that they can potentially use to solve a specific problem. Ensuring that we build a strong ecosystem, which is robust and wide, is very important. And hence, all these structures and schemas in place to help our partners work with us and deliver customer satisfaction. Well, that's good. We went from a nice collection of things down to a pretty straight use case, you know, kind of a pretty straightforward way of using things. So, well, that was a good overview. I appreciate it. So, if people want to check out this stuff more, I mean, what would you point? Yeah, absolutely. So, definitely go ahead and check out VMware Marketplace. So, you know, this is the foundation, as I mentioned, of all the applications that you can use through, that you can deploy on VMware Endpoints. We did have extensive coverage on the Marketplace portfolio of products during VMware, which just concluded last week. So, encourage folks to check the keynotes, check the talks, get to Marketplace. And, you know, again, we have easy to access, you know, if you have any other questions, just email us at VMware Marketplace and answer them. Well, great. Well, thanks for being on to go over this. That was good stuff. Thank you so much for having me, Cody. Yeah. And, as always, this has been another episode of Tanzu Talk. If you want to get the, I'll put some show notes up for this episode. You can get links to things we've talked about. And if you want to find those, you can go to tanzutalk.com. And there's also plenty of archives on all these various topics related to whether it's cloud native stuff, Kubernetes things, development, even the thrilling of strategy.
20:29As relates to all of this and other zany things like that. So, we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.