VMware Explore and SpringOne Highlights from the Tanzu Division’s Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Strohmeyer

Interviewed by Jennifer Stevens, Tanzu Communications

Q: Kevin, there was a lot of excitement on the show floor, starting with SpringOne. Can you give us some highlights from the Spring Spotlight?

Absolutely. We kicked off SpringOne with the Spring Spotlight, where we showcased amazing innovation across the Spring ecosystem with Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4. As always, the performance improvements and flexibility were well appreciated by the developers in the audience. The highlight for me was Josh Long's demo. He has this incredible superpower to be able to code, talk, present-all on the fly in front of a crowd.

He demoed how easy it is to add an MCP server to a Spring app with Spring AI with his fictitious dog adoption agency. With a few lines of codes the chatbot interfaced with a prospective adoptive dog-parent AND scheduled an appointment to pick up the pup in the adopter's Google calendar. This validated our leadership in the developing Model Context Protocol (MCP) for me.

Late last year MCP was just announced and we were at the forefront of that technology partnering with Anthropic. Together we developed the MCP Java SDK, which has been named the official Java SDK for MCP. Now all those patterns are built right into the enterprise framework with Spring AI and companies can add AI safely to their enterprise apps. The ability to bring in all these tools and contacts through MCP is just so powerful. It was inspiring to see a year's worth of innovation come alive in one session.

Q: Tanzu released some big news at Explore with the introduction of VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence. Can you provide some color commentary on how it was received by reporters, analysts, customers?

VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence was certainly the star of the show along with VMware Tanzu Platform 10.3. In short, we're reimagining some very powerful technology that we already have with VMware Tanzu Greenplum, VMware Tanzu GemFire, VMware Tanzu Data Flow, VMware Tanzu Rabbit MQ, and putting that in a context that now is hugely relevant for customers looking to harness the power of their enterprise data in AI application development. It's about helping them get the most ROI from their data.

In most enterprises today, data lives in different departments, different silos and different systems. Adding data lakehouse platform capabilities from Tanzu Data Intelligence provides unified, low-latency access to data so developers can focus on development and innovation with AI applications and agentic AI. So, I think Tanzu Data Intelligence, built with tried, truly tested, highly scalable data solutions, really underscores that Tanzu has the right technology at the right time, and the right context of what we can do with AI. That was compelling and very well received. Customers and partners were really excited by the possibilities and potential of this offering.

Q: Yes, Purnima Padmanabhan commented that enterprise data is a gold mine and we just need to help developers gain access to it with curated data sets. Now tell me a little bit more about Tanzu Platform 10.3 and the new capabilities that were debuted at Explore.

Sure, but first let's set some context since we introduced Tanzu Platform 10 at Explore last year. The platform has evolved a lot since then. I think explaining to our customers the movement of all the Kubernetes resources into VCF was important in positioning VCF as a complete infrastructure solution and then having clarity that Tanzu Platform is a true, pre-engineered Platform as a Service (PaaS) based on Cloud Foundry. I think some customers were not aware of that change, and appreciate the power of simplicity with CF and how we are continuing to invest in that proven technology with Tanzu Platform 10.3.

Through the many breakout sessions and demos, we really showcased how easy it is for customers to take existing apps, bring them onto Tanzu Platform and have them modernized and upgraded just by virtue of bringing them onto the platform. We've baked so many of the best practices and recipes for application modernization into this product. Thinking about the needs of platform engineers, we added greater operational control, visibility and out-of-the-box observability dashboards. These enhancements deliver radical security transparency and fleet management.

Customers are loving this continued innovation and the seamless integration with Tanzu Data Intelligence. It's a powerful combination in AI application delivery.

Q: Speaking of customers, what were a few of the customer stories that really resonated for you?

One commercial banking customer was really excited to share their patching strategy. Previous to using Tanzu Platform for automation and remediation, they were doing this work on a case by case basis. Now, with Tanzu Platform, they regularly restage and push their applications from the platform level which flushes out any persistent threats and vulnerabilities with no downtime.

The power to automatically update at scale without an outage was revolutionary for them. It was awesome to see how Tanzu Platform can completely change how customers are going to make a monumental shift in operations.

Q: So we're on day three of VMware Explore, the close of the show. What's the Tanzu Division take home message that you'd like to underscore?

The core message we want to emphasize is, Tanzu helps you get ideas to code and your code to production.

I'd like people to walk away confident that we are continuing to add features and capabilities to the platform that make it easier and safer for our customers to adopt the latest AI innovation and deliver intelligent apps at scale. While AI has the industry buzzing and to some it seems complex and hard, we approach it as just another type of microservice that we can add into the application development and delivery process on Tanzu Platform.

We abstract away the complexity so application teams can innovate, focus on business logic, manage different workflows, and think about how to leverage data for better customer experiences. That's the Tanzu promise in its most pure form. And that theme carried throughout the entire show.

One last note: I continue to be in awe of the Tanzu team and our ability to collaborate and get the job done. The entire team put together a fantastic event with great energy and enthusiasm across the board. It is infectious and I think our customers see it when they talk to our experts at the booth, in our one-on-ones and in our sessions. I love being part of it all - it's very gratifying.