VMware a ‘great alternative’ to the public cloud – Broadcom CEO

• Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom, uses VMware Explore cloud event in Las Vegas to extol business case merits of building private on-prem clouds with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)
• Since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware last November, Tan says there has been a “doubling down” on improving ease-of-use for VCF practitioners
• He claims more than 80% of enterprise CIOs are considering repatriation of workloads from the public cloud
• A blitz of announcements at VMware Explore include a preview of VCF 9, latest version of Tanzu cloud-native platform, developments in software‑defined edge products, and favourable VCF financial metrics from IDC

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan was in rally-the-troops mode at the VMware Explore 2024 event in Las Vegas, telling attendees – which included some 4,000 practitioners of VMware software – in his keynote presentation to build private on-prem clouds with the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack, VMware’s flagship enterprise-class private cloud platform aimed at delivering public cloud scale and resiliency.

The latest version, VCF 9, was unveiled during the three-day shindig, although Broadcom touted this as the “future of VCF” rather than something fully available today. New VCF features in the pipeline include simplified deployment and management options for private cloud.

On the sidelines of the event, in a video interview with Six Five Media, Tan said Broadcom had been “doubling down” on what VMware practitioners and enterprise CIOs “care about” since its $61bn acquisition of VMware, a cloud computing and software specialist, last November: Namely ease of use, security, scale and resilience.

“Users love [VMware] software and it’s very stable, but they think it could be better,” remarked Tan. “More than that, they think the components could be put together to run much better. That’s exactly the story we’ve delivered [to VMware Explore attendees].”

A key part of the VMware story is the rapidly evolving and simplified VCF, which Tan thinks will appeal even to who he calls the “Vsphere ESXi diehards” among the practitioners. The VMware Vsphere Foundation is itself a simplified, enterprise-grade workload platform for mid-sized to smaller customers.

To [Vsphere] practitioners, [VCF] is the opportunity to show that we are the experts,” claimed Tan. “We have the skills to create and build private on-prem cloud for CIOs. For partners, resellers and systems integrators, it’s a huge opportunity to get it deployed and get it operating.”

Tan showed a slide in his keynote speech indicating that CIOs may well be receptive to private on-prem cloud overtures from suppliers, including (of course) VMware. “Over 80% of CIOs are considering the repatriation of workloads back from public cloud to on-prem, and VCF is a great alternative to the public cloud,” asserted Tan in his video interview.

“We have the technology. We have the solutions. Use them. That’s our message to enterprise CIOs,” continued Tan. “We can build a resilient, secure environment, which was something they never had before [in private cloud].”

Viva Las Vegas for VMware news

Aside from VCF 9, Broadcom chose the glitz of Las Vegas to announce various VMware developments. Among them was the unveiling of VMware Tanzu Platform 10, a cloud-native application platform that purportedly “accelerates software delivery, providing platform engineering teams enhanced governance and operational efficiency while reducing toil and complexity for development team.”

Broadband flagged, too, developments across its software-defined edge product portfolio “to enable enterprises to support edge AI workloads via new and enhanced connectivity, deployment, and lifecycle management capabilities”.

A Broadcom-sponsored report from research firm IDC was also wheeled out at VMware Explore. From interviews with VCF users in private and hybrid cloud environments, IDC found that organisations could realise benefits worth an average annual average of $111,100 per 100 virtual machines.

– Ken Wieland, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV