Reflections from Explore Barcelona and the Challenges of Modern App Delivery

I've had an amazing week at Explore Barcelona. It is energizing to meet and talk to so many customers, partners and team members and as I reflect, I wanted to capture some of the highlights and a few of the learnings as well.

VMware Tanzu Platform 10

There was a buzz around the new Tanzu Platform 10 release all week. At the general session, our very own Valentina Alaria introduced Tanzu Platform as an advanced service for VMware Cloud Foundation on the main stage. This will be the first completely self-managed release of Tanzu Platform and empowers platform engineers to deliver to their developer teams the simplicity and power of public cloud experiences with the governance and operations necessary for private cloud deployments. Later that day, Oren Penso and DaShaun Carter delivered an outrageously funny skit during my Tanzu general manager session that may have hit a little too close to home playing on the tensions between IT operations and the developer teams that would rather not deal with central IT at all. Of course, Oren the Platform Engineer, was the hero, delivering an application space to the dev team with all the services they need for their app in minutes. But what really blew everyone's mind was when Oren delivered the developer team a set of GenAI chatbot services and brokered access to a variety of LLMs that could be run in CPU, in the cloud, or on the new VMware Private AI Foundation-run models.

VMware Tanzu Data

The other headliner from Explore Barcelona was Tanzu Data and the new VMware Tanzu Data Services offering. You just don't build apps without data and we really don't talk enough about the amazing Tanzu Data portfolio. I am privileged to have on my team the world's foremost experts in open source data solutions, as many organizations are moving away from legacy proprietary relational databases and messaging services to technologies like Postgres, MySQL, RabbitMQ and Valkey. We already include these four data services in Tanzu Platform, but we saw a huge opportunity to offer these same services directly for VCF and created a new offering, Tanzu Data Services, a subset of our larger VMware Tanzu Data Suite that also includes VMware Tanzu Greenplum and VMware Tanzu GemFire.

Customer conversations

My favorite element of our user conference is the opportunity to hear from so many customers and partners about their use cases, challenges and how they approach cloud native application delivery. While each company's circumstances are unique, there were common threads that criss-crossed my conversations with customers: a need for more frequent releases and accelerated time to market for their business applications, and the challenge of "shadow IT" when central IT teams can't meet the needs of the business as quickly as they'd like, especially for on-premises environments.

The need for more frequent app releases surfaced in almost every prospective customer meeting. Many shared that it's taking months to deploy. In many cases, while app developers have collected the requirements, business logic and other APIs for applications, after the code has been written, deployment is more complex because they are adding data, security, and governance - sometimes manually through templates - and it is taking months and is more at risk of breaking. Developers are mired down in decisions that can easily be addressed and automated by a platform engineer on Tanzu Platform. When Iain Mobberley and I shared with a large employment agency that Tanzu Platform can cut deployment time down from months to days, they leaned in to learn more.

One of the most salient themes throughout the week was the importance of platform engineering teams, not only in providing developers with services, but also the ability for organizations to adopt new technologies in part because they have a well-functioning platform engineering team. One customer from an automotive manufacturer noted that as their organization adopts an AI strategy, the platform engineering team has become "the connector between the business, the IT team and developers" to help these teams address application requirements, regulations, data security, and infrastructure costs all associated with delivering GenAI-powered applications. This customer noted that his platform team is uniquely positioned to ensure their organization gets the most out of GenAI while also ensuring appropriate governance and cost controls, in part because they are leveraging GenAI on Tanzu Platform. Additionally, our Modern Apps track included several breakout sessions focused on platform engineering, including sessions covering the role of a platform team, practical skills, how to begin thinking about providing developer services on top of private cloud and sessions focused on offering GenAI-as-a-service to developers leveraging Tanzu Platform's AI capabilities. There were many nodding heads in the audience when our Tanzu speakers discussed the role platform teams play as the intermediary between IT and the business.

What happened to TKG?

One of the lessons I took from the week was that there is still confusion over the Kubernetes runtime we sell and where it sits in the VMware by Broadcom portfolio. Earlier this year, we moved what was known as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service from Tanzu and included it as part of VCF where it is renamed to VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service. This move was very intentional as the Kubernetes runtime itself is just part of any modern cloud IaaS, and this being deeply embedded into the VCF stack means that more VCF customers will be ready to adopt advanced services offered by Tanzu sooner, without struggling with integration. Many existing Tanzu customers use other versions of the Kubernetes runtime (namely, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Multicloud) to meet specific requirements. Tanzu will continue to support these versions, but in the end, Tanzu Platform is designed to run on any CNCF conformant Kubernetes runtime.

The future of VMware Tanzu

This year has been transformational for the Tanzu Division on many fronts as we evolved and simplified the Tanzu portfolio to address our customers' most challenging issues in delivering highly-performant, AI-powered applications into the hands of their customers. Explore Barcelona 2024 proved to be an inflection point in this journey and a great opportunity to gather more intelligence on what we need to clarify in our messaging and the value we deliver to customers.