New Delhi, Oct 6 (IANS): As organisations of all sizes reinvent themselves in the new normal post-pandemic in India, multi-cloud will be the digital business model for the next 20 years, enterprise software major VMware chief executive officer Raghu Raghuram stressed.

The average organisation today is running roughly 500 applications to drive their business, and those apps are distributed across clouds.

"It's no longer about a 'cloud-first' approach -- it's about being 'cloud-smart'. Organisations should have the freedom to choose the 'right' cloud, based on their strategic business goals," Raghuram said during the annual 'VMworld 2021' virtual conference.

"With our cloud-agnostic approach, we are uniquely positioned to meet our customers where they are and take them where they want to go. We give every organisation the power to accelerate their innovation and control their own destiny in the multi-cloud era," he added.

Seventy five per cent of VMware customers are relying on two or more public clouds, and 40 per cent are using three or more.

This multi-cloud approach increases app velocity and innovation and allows organisations to be much more agile and resilient.

However, a multi-cloud environment is far more diverse, complex, and distributed than anything organisations have managed in the past.

This complexity often forces trade-offs between moving fast and managing risk, resulting in slower execution while increasing costs.

The company has announced its strategy to help customers navigate the multi-cloud era with the launch of 'VMware Cross-Cloud services'.

This group of integrated services will help deliver a faster and smarter path to cloud for digital businesses, providing customers with the ability to build, run and better secure apps across any cloud with freedom and flexibility.

The company has announced new advancements for VMware Cloud, the multi-cloud computing infrastructure that enables customers to move their enterprise apps to the cloud in nearly half the time and less than half the cost.

VMware also introduced advances to its 'VMware Tanzu' portfolio to enable management and operation of applications at scale and provide developers with the autonomy to build and deploy apps on any cloud.

"With the breadth and depth of the Tanzu portfolio, VMware is uniquely positioned to meet our customers where they are now, providing the tools, training, enablement and services that will help them progress along their entire app modernisation journey, across infrastructure, applications, and any cloud," VMware's Senior Vice President and General Manager, Modern Apps & Management Business Group, Ajay Patel, said.