Broadcom CEO pitches on-prem private clouds

VMware customers and partners gathered in Las Vegas this week for the first VMware Explore conference since Broadcom finalized its acquisition of the company. From the moment the first keynote session began, attendees were greeted with the message that VMware by Broadcom has been listening to its customers, and what it has been hearing is a call for simplicity.

“Simplicity is a superpower that’s strong,” said Chris Wolf, global head of AI and advanced services, VMware Cloud Foundation division of Broadcom. “And some of you might have heard this from a long, long time ago — before I joined VMware, I used to tell people that complexity is great for profits, just not theirs. And simplicity certainly can be the antidote, certainly a powerful antidote.”

Whether it’s an antidote for the many customer concerns voiced since the acquisition remains to be seen. But, Wolf said, “When we’re looking at the innovations that we’re driving, it’s all based on your feedback. It’s based on really listening and building our products the way that you’ve been asking us to do them for years.”

Broadcom president and CEO Hock Tan continued the theme, saying that customers have been telling him that they want VMware’s products to work better, be user friendly, and “to actually work together.”

“You’re asking us — you’re asking me, particularly — roll up your sleeves, do the hard work. And you’ll see over the next hour, that’s exactly what we have done,” he said. “We are all about business at Broadcom, and we’re here to help you run your business more effectively. We’re not here to show you bright shiny objects.”

One bright shiny object that VMware pursued a decade ago, he said, was the public cloud. And as a result, he said, “you’re all now suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. You’re confronting the three Cs of public cloud. Costs: Public cloud is much more expensive, more so than you can ever expect. Complexity: It is another platform. It’s another extra layer for you to manage. And in Compliance, if you have regulatory policy requirements.”

“So, here’s my view,” Tan said. “Very simple: The future of the enterprise — your enterprise — is private. Private cloud, private AI, your own private data. It’s about staying on prem and in control. Of course, you continue using public cloud for elastic demand and bursting workloads, but in this hybrid world, the private cloud is now the platform to drive your business and your innovation, and we have work to do to make that happen.”

He noted that legacy data centers are siloed, and “you are so screwed because silos don’t work well together, and it’s painful for you to deliver services to your internal customers.” Troubleshooting is also a challenge, with the inevitable finger-pointing that leads to delays in finding the root cause of an issue, he said. And deployment of new applications takes longer than it should.

Paul Turner, vice president of products, VMware Cloud Foundation division, admitted that the problem of silos existed within VMware as well as with its customers.

“We built products that were focused on each of the silos,” he said. “We needed to do better. We had to bridge our silos. We didn’t have single-sign-on authentication across our products. We didn’t have common policies. You talked about us not having unified tagging. You talked about us having independent product lifecycle, independent logging, no common alerting. We could do better, and we have.”

VMware’s solution, he said, was to make its software products work well together in a single platform known as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and the upcoming major release, VCF 9, addresses many of the complaints, adding a new operations console, centralized governance policies, a common identity system, unified license and fleet management, and more.

Read more about VMware Explore 2024 and Broadcom’s product advances