Here at the VMware Explore annual customer and partner event in Las Vegas, the virtualisation and cloud software services king is fleshing out its much trumpeted private cloud strategy.
After 15 years of being involved in the technology industry’s dash to the cloud, and particularly the public cloud, VMware, now part of Broadcom, is doing an about face. It is attempting to take customers back to the private cloud, in the face of rising public cloud costs, and, for some, less scalability and flexibility.
It is, of course, no charity, and wants customers of all sizes to buy into or scale up their use of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform of services, when previously the offering was mainly used by large organisations.
For VMware though, private cloud doesn’t just mean on-premise clouds. While on-premise is expected to generate more sales for VMware going forward, private cloud includes cloud deployments at the edge, in data centres, clouds that run the services of service providers, and even private clouds used by public cloud hyperscalers to deliver their services too.
In his opening keynote in Las Vegas this morning, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan (pictured) told attendees: “Our own customers – 70% of them – tell us they want to come back on-prem. Since the acquisition of VMware, we have rolled up our sleeves, done the engineering work, and the result is VCF 9.0.”
He maintained that the new and now widely available offering was a single, tightly integrated SKU (stock keeping unit), that was a plug and play solution to provide all the benefits of a private cloud “that are better than the public cloud”, and which also addressed the “pain points” customers were concerned about when considering a migration from public clouds to private clouds.
Tan outlined what the pain points being mitigated were:
-Developers just want the right code, and weren’t interested in the infrastructure used. VMware was providing the infrastructure with the specifications needed by developers, breaking down barriers to deliver compute, networking and storage. “This is not a ‘nice to have’, it’s essential”, said Tan.
-On cybersecurity threats, companies say they care, but don’t want things slowed down. VMware says it has provided a broad set of features built into VCF to make sure firms are protected.
-On being weighed down by legacy infrastructure, Tan said: “We want to make a hero of you in your organisation. Let go of IT’s past, plan for the future, and don’t go straight to the public cloud as a solution.”
Stephen Flaherty, chief technology officer and head of group technology infrastructure services at Barclays Bank, told the audience: “VCF is now underpinning our whole infrastructure platform. VCF 9.0 is being used to advance our key applications, providing the right storage and the elasticity needed. On-prem is more flexible than public clouds.”
Announcements at the show
Key enhancements at the event included:
-Broadcom makes VMware Cloud Foundation an AI native platform and accelerates developer productivity: Broadcom continues to drive customer momentum for VCF and an innovation roadmap that delivers a modern private cloud, with the announcement that VMware Private AI Services will become a standard component of VCF 9.0, making VCF an AI native platform.
-VMware Cloud Foundation elevates cyber resilience, compliance, and security for the modern private cloud: Broadcom announces a new VCF Cyber Compliance Advanced Service and new innovations across VMware vDefend and VMware Avi, to strengthen resilience, compliance and security for customers adopting a modern private cloud in regulated industries.
-VMware Tanzu delivers speed and security with AI-ready data and application platform to drive agentic AI innovation: The availability of VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence, a data lakehouse platform that provides unified, low-latency access to multimodal data at scale to drive faster, more secure analytics, applications, and agentic AI. The company also introduced VMware Tanzu Platform 10.3.
-Broadcom accelerates AI innovation in the modern private cloud with NVIDIA: Broadcom is working to bring the latest NVIDIA AI technology to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Through this collaboration with NVIDIA, enterprises and cloud service providers will be “empowered” to build, deploy, and scale next-generation AI models on cutting-edge AI servers within their modern private cloud environments.
-Broadcom and Canonical expand partnership to optimise VMware Cloud Foundation for modern container and AI workloads: Broadcom and Canonical have expanded their collaboration to help customers ship modern container-based and AI applications faster and more securely, by combining Canonical’s trusted open-source software with VCF.
More to follow from VMware Explore in Las Vegas...
