Heralding The Era Of Private

When Broadcom CEO and President Hock Tan took the stage at the Venetian Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas, United States to kick off VMware Explore 2024 on August 27, the energy reeked of signalling that change of guard and heralding a new era. This was the first Explore since Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of VMware in November 2023. Minutes into his keynote, the message from Tan was clear - “The future of enterprise is private.”

Citing challenges associated with public cloud adoption such as high costs, complexity and compliance, Tan asserted that the future of enterprise IT lies in private cloud solutions.

“Of course, you continue using the public cloud for elastic demand and bursting of workloads. But in this hybrid world, the private cloud is the platform to drive your business and innovation,” he said. As he continued highlighting the efficiencies and problems associated with legacy data centres, the VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF). He claimed that VCF 9 would accelerate customers’ transition from siloed IT architectures to a unified and integrated private cloud platform.

Broadcom claimed that VCF is the industry’s first private cloud platform to deliver public cloud scale and agility with private cloud security, resilience and performance, and low overall total cost of ownership.

“To break the infrastructure silos, reclaim control of public cloud sprawl, and capture the opportunity for AI in the enterprise, our customers are shifting from best-of-breed siloed [ Arjun, SVP & GM, VCF Division, Broadcom.

A recent IDC Business Value study found that with VCF, organisations not only optimise their infrastructure costs and staff time requirements, but also positively affects business outcomes through more effective application development and enabling security time on improving security results.

Private AI
But private cloud solutions weren’t the only thing that would make up this private suite. Tan mentioned Private AI as well, which the company claimed was the fastest growing new product in their portfolio.

“Private AI is the fastest-growing new product with which I have been associated with in my career,” remarked Chris Wolf, Global Head of AI and Advanced Services, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom while addressing a briefing at Explore’24.

And rightly so, the company’s AI revenue in the second quarter of this fiscal jumped 280 per cent year-on-year to $3.1 billion. The company expects the revenue from AI to be much stronger at over $11 billion for fiscal’24.

Wolf noted that the company is seeing tremendous customer adoption for Private AI, particularly in financial services and public sector verticals. He also touched upon the use cases of Private AI with emphasis on contact centre resolution and its effectiveness in handling private customer support data.

Indians Driving The AI Agenda
Given these developments around AI, Wolf appreciated Indian engineers and said they are “actively driving” the company’s AI agenda.

“A significant proportion of the features announced here at Explore have been developed by one of my engineering teams in India and they have been doing it quite well,” he said.

A recent IDC study found that nearly a third (29 per cent) of all GenAI budget is allocated to creating and delivering new software driven business offerings. However, an S&P Global Market Intelligence research shows that over half (52.6 per cent) of organisations face a shortage of technology skills in the area of AI and machine learning, creating a significant obstacle to capitalise on GenAI innovations.

Amidst these challenges, Broadcom also announced Tanzu AI solutions, a set of capabilities within the Tanzu Platform the help applications teams deliver GenAI - powered intelligent applications quickly, safely and at scale.

“Business leaders want to harness the power of GenAI in their application strategy, but in many cases, they face complex challenges with this emerging technology, leading teams to create one-off experiments and silos that only add technical debt and risk,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, general manager, Tanzu Division, Broadcom.

“Now, with Tanzu Platform’s built-in AI development framework, developers can build high-performing, intelligent apps, regardless of their experience level or knowledge of Python,” she added.

Broadcom’s approach to private AI was first unveiled at Explore’23. It was then described as a powerful architectural approach that could provide customers with the benefits of AI without compromising data control, privacy and compliance. A year later, at Explore’24, Wolf mentioned that the starting costs for AI turned out to be far less than what they thought.

And while private was the theme all over, Tan reiterated the three main commitments made post VMware’s acquisition - simplifying VMware’s product offering, enhancing ease of use and integration, and investing in ecosystem development for partners and customers. He resonated with attendees’ feedback and reaffirmed their desire form VMware’s products to be more user friendly and better integrated.

(The writer was hosted by Broadcom for VMware Explore’24 in Las Vegas, United States)

Arjun Yadav

BW Reporters The author is Correspondent, BW Businessworld