Three Transformations for the Smarter Way to Cloud

We know that, in general, progress is a good thing. In our world of IT, best practices, competition, consumer preferences, and technology itself are all constantly evolving. And with evolution comes a need for us all to change. Do we simply make incremental changes to our products in an effort to try and keep up? Or do we take a more introspective, strategic approach, based on input from our customers and reset to where the market is really going? To transform not just for today, and not just for ourselves-but for the future of an industry?

Well, we chose the latter. Our customers played a central role in these changes. Across countless customer conversations, we repeatedly heard these themes:

1. We need you to focus on private cloud i.e. a cloud that is based on the customer's "private" infrastructure that spans on-prem, edge, hyperscalers, and other service providers.
2. We need a resilient and cyber-secure cloud platform that enables us to deliver an operating and consumption experience like the public cloud.

Working with partners and analysts across the industry, we weren't surprised to find a lot of validation. One reason for renewed focus on private cloud: compared to the past, customers have recently taken a more balanced approach to where they locate their applications between on-prem and public cloud. It's not a sudden turnaround, either. We watched this play out as customers have been moving workloads back to private environments after realizing that, for a variety of reasons, the public cloud is simply not always the right fit.

What about the ask for a Cloud platform? Primarily because customers were finding that their private environments were not delivering the cloud agility they needed, with most architectures based on silos of technology. Over the years, many customers turned to integrating disparate technologies which, in ideological terms, created their own cloud solutions. Unfortunately, many found that their siloed architectures didn't produce the operational efficiencies and total cost of ownership improvements that they'd hoped for.

So for the past several months, we've dug deep to make changes in order to deliver the best private cloud platform to accelerate innovation for our customers. While at the same time, working to solve IT's growing challenges around cost, complexity, and compliance.

I had the opportunity to share the results of that work at Explore Las Vegas earlier today and wanted to share my thoughts with those who could not be there in person this year. I called the session "Three Transformations for the Smarter Way to Cloud." Let me explain why.

Transforming VMware

The first transformation we focused on was the one that we went through ourselves in order to build a cloud platform as opposed to several disparate products. I shared how we needed to make significant changes and move away from VMware's siloed business unit structure and collapse all the relevant technologies into one division to be able to make the most of Broadcom's R&D investment in delivering the VCF platform.

The next two transformations aimed to showcase the tangible outcomes of the broad changes we implemented.

Transforming Experience

We were thrilled to announce the latest evolution of our flagship offering, VMware Cloud Foundation 9, during the VMware Explore General Session. But if that was the appetizer, we brought the entrée with an in-depth demo and discussion between Anu Kirpekar, Head of Platform Engineering, and William Lam, Senior Staff Solution Architect. Together, they shared how VMware Cloud Foundation 9 transforms the experience for three key stakeholder personas: Cloud Admin, Dev/Platform Engineer, and IT Leader.

The Explore attendees were excited to see how innovation is accelerating at Broadcom, and the efficiencies our engineering teams are bringing to improve our stakeholders' day-to-day work flows.

Transforming Infrastructure

But to deliver that unified cloud experience, we also needed help our customers transform and modernize their infrastructure.

In this section we barrelled through a huge amount of innovation we brought to the individual technology domains, and how we bridged the operating silos that used to slow them down. We showed how this was a ready-for-anything infrastructure, accelerating every type of workload from VM's, container-based applications, to AI/ML.

And we heard from the incredible team at Charlotte Pipe and Foundry who shared their own innovation and digital transformation story. You may not think "cloud" when hearing about the journey of an underground infrastructure manufacturer and supplier, but you should. They've embraced VMware Cloud Foundation in a big way, to help drive strategic sales and IT initiatives across their organization.

Innovating on the Foundation

A foundation is just that-something upon which you can build. And so we shared VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Advanced Services, a robust catalog of ready-to-deploy solutions that extend the capabilities of VCF to meet specific needs and use cases. To help illustrate this, we called attention to two services.

The first was Disaster Recovery. VMware Cloud Foundation is built for resilience and protection at all layers. But to be properly secure, you have to be ready for when things go wrong, whether physical disaster or a successful ransomware attack. VMware Live Recovery is a solution that accelerates recovery with a 75% faster return from unplanned downtime.

The second advanced service we highlighted was Private AI. For this, Manuvir Das, VP, Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA, joined me on stage to provide updates on our partnership and some exciting upcomingnews.

It was this time last year we announced Private AI, our architectural approach to bringing the power of AI to enterprise data. And to deliver that we also announced VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. Since then, our engineering teams have continued to work together and have been delivering for customers since it became available in May 2024.

Together we discussed several new Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA capabilities to enhance secure and efficient AI deployments, including a curated Model Store and Guided Deployment tools. We talked about future enhancements focusing on improving operational efficiency, capacity planning, and offering new services like data retrieval and AI agent building. And Manuvir shared some unique, proven use cases powered by their impressive new NVIDIA NIM Blueprints.

Meeting You Where You Are and Ensuring Success

Finally, I was able to share all the work we are doing to make the solution easy for our customers to adopt with value-based incremental steps. We announced the Private Cloud Modernization Program, designed to guide customers' private cloud transformation with VMware Cloud Foundation.

We understand you are in various stages of cloud maturity and want to meet you where you are in your journey to provide a phased approach to adopting and consuming VCF.

The Smarter Way to Cloud

It is always a privilege to be in the room with our community when making big announcements and showing the results of all the engineering work going into VMware Cloud Foundation. We received fantastic feedback from some of the audience, who were excited about the potential for their roles, and I hope you feel some of that excitement too.

VMware Explore is about learning what's next in the cloud and diving into solutions directly with experts to accelerate your next big move. The sheer amount of content produced around the event is head-spinning and I recommend setting aside some time to lean in, especially if you weren't able to join in person. I've included several links throughout this blog to give you even more insight into the topics I touched on during my talk. Give them a read. Share them with your friend who works in the cyber resiliency space, or your cloud admin colleague who is struggling with their current solution. Cloud transformation can be complex and sometimes uncomfortable, but it's necessary if we're going to meet the evolving demands of our customers and the industry. By embracing this journey and getting up to speed on the latest, we're not just keeping up with the market-we're shaping its future.

Ultimately, transformation isn't just about responding to change; it's about anticipating it and positioning yourself to lead. The three transformations we explored reflect a deliberate shift toward a smarter, more agile cloud future. Thank you for being part of this journey with us, and I look forward to what we'll build together next.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.