Broadcom at VMware Explore: Cloud Innovations Unveiled

On Tuesday, 26 August 2025, Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) took center stage at VMware Explore 2025 Las Vegas, showcasing its latest strides in private cloud technology. The conference call highlighted the launch of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, emphasizing enhanced integration, security, and cost management. While the tone was optimistic about VCF’s potential to redefine IT, the competitive landscape with public cloud solutions remains a consideration.

Key Takeaways

• Broadcom announced the general availability of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, focusing on private cloud advantages over public alternatives.
• VCF 9.0 promises improved integration with technologies like Canonical Ubuntu for better Kubernetes deployment.
• Customer testimonials from Barclays and Grinnell Mutual highlighted significant cost savings and enhanced security.
• Future developments include private AI as a service and enhanced cybersecurity measures.
• Broadcom aims to provide flexibility and control over AI infrastructure through open ecosystems and interoperability.

Operational Updates

The conference underscored VCF 9.0 as a fully integrated software-defined platform, designed to unify IT infrastructure and accelerate application development. Key features include:

• Seamless operation of containers and virtual machines, breaking down organizational silos.
• Enhanced security and cost management compared to public cloud solutions.
• Developer velocity improvements through on-demand environment provisioning and pipeline integration.
• Live patching capabilities, allowing zero downtime during updates.

Customer Perspectives

Barclays and Grinnell Mutual shared their experiences with VCF 9.0:

• Barclays uses VCF to host AI workloads on-premises, enhancing developer velocity and creating a unified cloud experience.
• Grinnell Mutual reported potential savings of up to $1 million by moving to vSAN, with plans to transform and unify their IT infrastructure.

Future Outlook

Broadcom outlined three key investment areas for the next generation of VCF:

• Infrastructure at the speed of the developer, aiming to accelerate production paths.
• Private AI as a service, with bundled AI services and enhanced GPU support through partnerships with NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD.
• Cyber resilient data, focusing on security resilience with features like zero-trust security and automated ransomware recovery.

Conclusion

For a detailed understanding of Broadcom’s strategic initiatives and customer insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - VMware Explore 2025 Las Vegas:

Unidentified speaker: Welcome. Welcome, people. It’s great to be here today, and I’ll always look forward to this event. It’s a chance to engage with family. And a special shout out to those v m VMUG members here today.

We love you guys. Well, last year, I was here. We talked about private cloud being the future of the enterprise. Twelve months later, the future is here, and we have the data to back that up. Global survey of IT professionals earlier this year made it clear what you, your top priority, wants.

Seven out of 10 of you plan to come back on prem. You want to invest in private cloud. But here’s the challenge. We always have this. VMware, you know that, innovated for years, but they never truly integrated the building blocks of a cloud.

This is just a sampling what we’ve heard from you. But now here’s the good news. Since the acquisition two years ago, we rolled up our sleeves, did the tough engineering work, and the result today is VMware Cloud Foundation nine point zero, a real software defined platform to run all your application workloads with complete compute, networking, and storage tightly integrated. And this is what you asked for. We deliver VCF as a single SKU.

We made it plug and play. And with VCM nine dot zero, just want you to know private cloud now outperforms public cloud. It has better security, better cost management, and, of course, greater control. So the technology works. It works like a dream, of course, with Broadcom and VMware.

But deploying into your organization may not be that easy. I run an organization myself. I get it. I feel your pain. So let’s talk about the three points of friction we see here.

Alright? Developers. Developers don’t want to think about infrastructure. Modern apps run on containers and developers just want to write code using their favorite DevOp tools. Meanwhile, your job is to put guardrails in place.

And with VCF nine point zero, we run containers as seamlessly as we run virtual machines. You no longer need two separate different platforms. We’re giving you infrastructure at the speed of the developer. And it’s not but it’s not just developers you need to work with. Look at your own team.

You have networking, you have storage, you have compute, you have security, and each of these teams speak their own language. Once again, this unified platform changes all that. With VCM nine point zero, you break down the silos in your organization. This is a platform that embraces IT developers and unites compute, networking, and storage. And here’s the payoff, big one, is an accelerated path to production for your apps today.

It is more than just nice to have. It’s critical for all of us. Moving on, next issue, your job is to secure the business against multiple threats, both physical and virtual. At the same time, all you face pressure to move quickly. How often do you hear this?

Yeah. We care about security. Just don’t let it slow things down. Well, VCF allows you to balance these two priorities. Okay?

We have a broad set of security solutions integrated into vcm9.zero. You no longer need a bunch of agents, additional security tools. It’s all built in. That brings me to the final, probably most important point of friction. Most of you continue to be weighed down by your legacy infrastructure, and you’re afraid to move forward.

So how do you let go of your IT past so you can build for the future? Well, I can tell you for sure, the answer is not to run straight to public cloud as you did five, ten years ago. If you’re going to do cloud, do it right. Embrace VCF nine dot 0 and stay on prem. That VCF 9 is the culmination of twenty five years of VMware technology and innovation, and this is the platform for the future.

And we want for you. We want to give you the best cloud platform in the world, and I mean that. We want to make you a hero, the person who drives this huge impact in your organization. But it’s one thing to hear me talk about private cloud and VCF nine dot zero. It’s even better to hear from a customer.

So now let’s take a look.

Steven Flaherty, Global Head of Infrastructure, Barclays: I’m Steven Flaherty. I head up the Chief Technology Office and Global Head of Infrastructure here at Barclays. I have the privilege of delivering the infrastructure components that underpin all of our key systems across the firm. Private cloud in Barclays is at the core of all of our business systems. It’s literally the lifeblood of all technology across the firm.

VMware Cloud Foundation underpins our Barclays virtual platform. It’s as fundamental as that. With the recent push on generative AI, we’re finding even more use cases to apply it to. That means from an infrastructure perspective, we need to think about our private cloud capabilities to host AI workloads as well as public going forward. Our unified cloud platform underpinned by VCF will allow us to run those AI workloads and those AI models on prem in the future.

So right now, we’re very bullish about what we’ll be able to achieve next year as we roll out VCF nine to the organization. Developer velocity is at the core of Barclays’ technology strategy. Us being able to provide environments on demand, to tear up and tear down our environments, to expand those environments, and more than anything else, to bake that into the pipelines and the way our engineers work is absolutely vital. Our people have evolved to become poly skilled, where the network engineers now understand storage and compute. The importance of our people evolution and lockstep with these platform constructs is vital.

VCF nine will be the foundation that joins together and creates our unified cloud experience. This will be probably the first time where we expect our engineers to have a public cloud like experience on prem. We’ll have a level of elasticity and expansion in this platform that will rival anything that we’re doing in public clouds. But more than that, it will be about the experience. We’ll have the embedded security, the compliance, the control aspects, and the simplicity and standardization will present us with more speed and stabilization than we’ve ever had before.

Paul Turner: Please welcome Paul Turner.

Unidentified speaker: Wow. What a great audience.

Paul Turner: You know, it’s it’s kind of fun actually being back here in Vegas. But you know, more importantly, what a story from Barclays. You know, for them, VCF isn’t just infrastructure. It’s powering their business. It’s delivering a secure private cloud for all their applications including AI.

They have transformed IT and VCF isn’t leading isn’t following that transformation, it is leading it. For years, one thing’s been true. VSphere is everywhere. It changed how business gets done. It allowed us to standardize and automate IT operations But virtualization was just the start.

The next chapter is private cloud. Delivering secure trusted applications today requires governance of networking, storage, backup, Doctor, security policies. These define the application perimeter and the reliability, security and availability of that application. VMware Cloud Foundation, VCF, delivers on that full promise of private cloud, automated, secure and ready for all applications. VMs, yes.

Containers, yes. AI, yes. This will power the next generation of the data center and deliver an agile, secure, private cloud environment that can be delivered anywhere, on premises, edge, hyperscalers, every hyperscaler that you know deploys us and of course all our service providers and CSPs. It’s IT moving at the speed of developers of providing the controls, security and trust the business requires. From global banks to healthcare, governments, defense industries, the most critical services that you know run on VCF.

And nine out of the top 10 fortune companies have committed to VCF, Trusted by 95% of top manufacturers. 90% to public sector. 85% of financial services. Even the biggest technology companies that you know, 90% of them are committed to VCF. Healthcare organizations.

And today, I’m really really pleased to announce that Walmart, the number one fortune company in the world is committed also to VCF. They have selected Broadcom as their strategic vendor for virtualization. What we are doing there is we’re helping to unify all of Walmart’s global distributed operations with VCF. So you’re not alone. Everyone’s moving this way.

A year ago today, was on this stage and we announced VCF nine point and we delivered on that promise. Over 1,000,000 of engineering, 5,000 engineers, 8,000 patents underpin that technology. VCF9 delivered available now GA. GA earlier this year. But don’t just take my word for it.

Our V experts are kind of like the leading technologies. They’re like the gurus of virtualization. Why don’t we hear what they have to say?

Unidentified speaker, V expert: We all know the drill with patching. Schedule your maintenance windows, migrate your workloads, reboot, and pray that nothing goes sideways. It’s really time consuming when you need to repeat this a couple 100 times across your environment. This is why I’m super excited for live patching in VCF nine, a true game changer. Patch your ESX host with zero reboots, zero migrations, and zero downtime.

I hear your weekends are now back. When a new patch drops, head over to VCF operations. Your single place to download, schedule, and deploy. Fast, simple, and secure.

Unidentified speaker, V expert: We all know threats are getting worse every day. Your perimeter, it’s not enough anymore. Ransomware will find your data and lock it, steal it, or leak it online. That’s why I’m excited about VCF nine SecOps dashboard. I can stay one step ahead.

Data arrest encryption is built in, so your data’s protected before hackers even get close. Plus, it watches who’s accessing what and flags anything suspicious. Brilliant.

Unidentified speaker, V expert: Before, we were constantly console hopping. One for capacity, another for certificates, health checks elsewhere. It was scattered manual and easy to miss critical stuff. Now VCF Health and Diagnostics is built right into VCF Operations. One view for your entire private cloud stack.

Seamlessly monitor health, track capacity, and catch expiring certificates early, all in one place, finally.

Unidentified speaker, V expert: One of the biggest storage challenges we used to have was efficiency, especially with duplicate data spread across multiple disk groups and hosts. But now with vSAN nine point zero, we finally introduced global deduplication, which scans the entire cluster for duplicate data without actually interfering with the virtual machines because it runs post process, so there’s no impact from a performance perspective. It has made storage planning simpler, it reduces cost, and it helps getting administrators more out of the hardware they already own. And on top of that, with memory tiering, in vSphere nine point zero, we’re also cutting compute cost by offloading cold memory pages to high speed storage.

Unidentified speaker, V expert: Creating a virtual private cloud can be complicated by acquiring NSX skills, network expertise, multiple teams. Even in vSphere, it was manual and time consuming. With vSphere nine, that’s changed. VPCs can now be created in under thirty seconds right from the vCenter. No handoffs, no network knowledge, just simple, intuitive workflows with built in multitenancy.

Fast, easy, efficient. Even my mom can do it.

Paul Turner: So what do you think about that? Come on. You know, it’s actually great to hear from the V experts, but you know, they missed on my favorite feature. I think they I wouldn’t say they got it wrong. They had some cool features, but my favorite is native Kubernetes built into VCF stack.

You know, That looks a heck of a lot better, right? So anyway, aside from that, you hear from us, you hear from the experts, it’s really important that we hear from customers like you. So please welcome on stage Jeremy Wright, Director of IT at Grinnell Mutual. Welcome Jeremy.

Jeremy Wright, Director of IT Infrastructure, Grinnell Mutual: Good morning. My name is Jeremy Wright and I am the Director of IT Infrastructure at Grinnell Mutual. We are a 116 year old insurance company tucked away in small town Iowa. And just like Grinnell, I consider my team to be small but mighty. We’re just 17 dedicated individuals supporting mission critical workloads for our customers, agents and mutuals across 19 states.

So let me take you back to last year’s Explore. I was out here just like many of you and I was wondering what is Broadcom going to do with VMware? And is VCF9 going to be fit for a small outfit like mine? I had followed the acquisition very closely. I had heard what people were saying about pricing.

So I came here looking for answers. And as I listened to sessions on VCF-nine’s tighter integration, I really started to think like this looks like it’s a good fit for really big companies, but is it powerful enough and fit for a team like mine? And that doubt lingered. I went to a pivotal vSAN session and it was a session on the financials of vSAN. And at the end of that session, I walked up to John Nicholson and I asked him a question.

I said, how do you get someone like me who’s very, very comfortable with discrete storage and how we use that across a metro storage cluster to go to something like vSAN? And his answer was just one sentence, but it gave me a very good perspective that I used that night to go over the math. And eventually, I figured out that going vSAN over discrete storage could save me up to $1,000,000 on my next renewal. And so I got really excited. I started going into these V Experts blogs like William Lamb’s, getting on the subreddits, listening to other customers and I started to look at global deduplication and site maintenance mode for stretched clusters like ours.

And VCF started to feel like it’s not going to be too big for us and that it’s just going to perfectly scale to my small team. But convincing the C suite is never automatic. Our hardware isn’t wasn’t up for renewal until March 2026. We had SQL licensing coming up, Microsoft renewals overlapping with this change. And so I drew on years of budget wrangling to craft a five year plan about how we were going to slash our lease spending and optimize our Microsoft renewals and deliver creative lease timing or creative timing on these payments.

And I presented it all to the CFO and the COO. And once I made that case crystal clear about how we would manage that transition period, they were on board. And so what sealed it for us and what is continuing to seal it for us is how VCF is transforming our infrastructure from the ground up. Grinnell is over a century old. Our IT has been layered on decade after decade, and it can be really hard to make change in an environment like that.

But VCF is helping us do that. And it’s not just software, it’s really a unifier for us. So for the first time, my network, systems, DevOps, DBA, desktop automation, telecom teams are working very closely together in the same platform. And we also have security at Grinnell. Whether you’re protecting 100 people or 10,000 people, a lot of the tooling is the same.

So our small security team has a lot of ground to cover. And VCF is turning out to be a force multiplier for our small security team as well. And VCF is really this hub where we’re all coming to work together and we’re building this shared understanding of what we’re all doing. We’re all in the same meetings. We understand the why behind how is this architected and why did we do this.

On a platform like AWS, I would need to hire more people. We would need to get more people in. We would have to build additional skills and we would end up creating additional silos because of that. But with VCF, it’s really allowing my small team to extract maximum value from a really cohesive set of tools. And that unifying software, it extends to that pain point that exists between infrastructure and developers.

Our developers were really struggling with VDI that we had built for them to run their IntelliJ IDE. And so we launched what I call Operation Monday. It’s all about giving time back to the developer. We’re going to containerize our IDE and then we’re going to deliver that to them using VMware Kubernetes Service and VCF Automation for the self- services piece. It’s a really exciting crossover engineering experience where we don’t have to talk to them or teach them about the VDI performance intricacies and they don’t have to school us on their developer tools.

And so what is this all going towards? What is it all laddering up to? It’s really allowing us to capture the full power of private cloud. I talked about like needing to hire more people to do this in AWS. And there’s this misconception that public cloud is always going to equal fewer people, but I just couldn’t make that make sense.

I would definitely need more headcount with additional skills. And so the story I’m telling and the story you should be telling is that VCF builds you a private cloud with all of the features, self-service, scalability, data sovereignty without the public cloud headaches. Stop thinking about it as servers and infrastructure and start thinking and talking about it as private cloud, period. That $1,000,000 savings that I was talking about, that’s really just the start. VCF is going to change every single one of the renewal conversations that we have in the next three to five years.

And it’s really exciting because all I see is possibility for saving money. I’ve used VMware products since the two. X days, and I feel like VMware has made me two promises. The first one is that we’re going to let you virtualize your workloads and extract maximum value from the hardware that you already own. And they’ve been delivering on that promise for a really, really long time.

The second one is that we’re going to enable customers of any size to run a full stack private cloud on prem. And for the first time, I really feel like VMware and Broadcom are delivering on that promise. So if my small team can embrace VCF, certainly so can you. And if a small team like mine can have these big ideas and do big things inside of ECF, so can you. Dive into the sessions, talk to your reps.

I really think that your moment is out there waiting for you at Explore this year. I want to say thank you to my Grinnell Mutual infrastructure team. Without them, none of this is possible. I want to say thank you to 27 for being an amazing partner during our implementation. And thank you to Broadcom for finally delivering a platform that lets our small shop punch above its weight.

Thank

Paul Turner: you, Jeremy and thank you for your whole team. It’s amazing when you hear a powerful story like that from Grinnell Mutual. They modernized, they had faster delivery, stronger security, their small team was able to scale and simpler operations. Whether it’s small, mid sized businesses, large or full strategic businesses, big government industries, all of them can be powered by VCF. So I changed shirt.

Why? We are not talking about just what we’ve done, a nine. You can get all that stuff now. We’re talking about the next generation of VCF. And I’m really pleased to talk about kind of three big areas that we’re looking at investing in that we are investing in to actually deliver the next part of the VCF9 platform.

Infrastructure at the speed of the developer, private AI but as a service and cyber resilient data. So Hock talked about developers and they need velocity. But what causes velocity? Right. We’ve got to accelerate developers.

We’ve got to help them move faster that accelerated path to production. That’s what creates velocity. Okay. So what if developers got the autonomy that they need but IT stayed in control? That’s the shift.

Developers get everything they want, speed, agility for their applications, business maintains security, trust, maintain the confidentiality of the business overall. The developers, I’m really happy to announce all of these new things that we are doing to accelerate that developer speed, accelerate that velocity of the developers and the autonomy of them. All of these are new developer services. VSAN native S3 object storage built into the platform available to all of you. Yes, block interfaces, file interface, S3 interfaces.

Secure enterprise grade Postgres and MySQL delivered by us, storage database as a service available for all of you and for all of those developers, full IS stack, all developers and service, you’re going to see it a little later. GitOps with Argo CD built in, you can actually do CICD pipelines, application delivery. You can go from a git based YAML spec of all of your different applications to auto deployment of those applications. An Istio service mesh, you don’t just need to build containers as a service. VMs, you’ve got containers as a service.

I can also build function as a service and I can actually interface those functions through a service mesh that we maintain and support for you as part of the platform. Policy is code, everything is codified. Everything is written. All of the specs in terms of your firewall rule settings, load balancer rule settings, everything configured in so that I can store that in my git, publish it, do my pipeline push, my CICD pipeline push, you name it and hardened containers, but more on that later. These six new features are going to dramatically accelerate developer productivity.

And the cool thing is they build on something that’s already there in nine point vSphere Kubernetes service is not just nine point it’s there in five point two point two. VSphere Kubernetes service is native in the platform. This gives you full lifecycle management of Kubernetes. Most importantly, a CNCF compliant, cloud native compute foundation, the open source standard for maintaining Kubernetes. This is fully compliant with that available to all of your customers.

You get multi cluster management so that you can manage across the different vCenter and different domain regions that you have for your environment. But not just that, Kubernetes requires a whole set of services to actually be complete. All of the standard Kubernetes packages are maintained and supported by us for you. All part of VCF, all included. That means you get Prometheus for monitoring.

You get a harbor registry service. You get Valero so you can do backup of your container based applications and much, much more. Right? Pinapad for identity management. Everything included.

This is what vSphere Kubernetes service is. VMs, containers, fully orchestrated with Kubernetes in the platform. Now I’m particularly excited about this announcement. This is huge. We’re taking the number one private cloud which is your beloved VCF.

But we’re combining it with the number one cloud OS in the world. Anyone know what that is? It’s Canonical Ubuntu. Canonical Ubuntu with this partnership, all of you are going to get an integrated Ubuntu with full maintained security updates, maintenance updates included in the platform. Long term support included.

You get these chisel containers. A chisel container allows us to actually build the We remove all the periphery libraries that are unnecessary for running that individual container. So what have you just done? You’ve reduced the security risk for that container and you do it for every container that you have, minimizing any security threats or risk. And AI ready images, so you’ve got all of the vGPU drivers, so out of box, the fastest AI deployment possible.

Together with canonical Ubuntu and the VCF platform and a vSphere Kubernetes service, this is the easiest Kubernetes deployment possible. It is Kubernetes at scale. It is containers and VMs in one platform, all orchestrated with Kubernetes. Thank you. I should have paused and waited for a clap and a cheer.

It is very cool. It is kind of cool. But instead of me talking about it because it’s much more fun to actually see a demo, which is why I have the shirt on. So let’s kind of see what this accelerated path to production. Remember, developer autonomy, IT control.

So, I’m the IT guy. So I’ve gone and set up inside in the organization multiple organizations. This is full multi tenancy in the VCF platform, legal, finance, engineering, IT. I’m going to drill into the legal organization. You can see I’ve set it up across multiple regions so that they can deploy disaster recovery as they need to for their applications.

And I also have I’ll go over to the services. I’ve enabled a whole set of services that that development team can run. Remember, they can run independently of IT but all of this through the policy control of IT. So I’ve set up a Kubernetes service for them. They of course have a virtual machine service.

They have volume and network because they of course they need to have the IaaS stack. But I’ve also enabled some other cool things. I’ve enabled private AI. All of the AI services are available to them. All of those images are available to them.

They have a registry service, the harbor registry service so they can manage their container runtime. But you will notice they are missing data services and most applications actually need a stateful database. So why don’t we enable some database services that IT thinks are the right controlled ones that their security teams have approved. So we will go and enable that. Go into the data services, right?

This is database as a service. Go into the data service layer, add a new data service policy. This one I going to call the Postgres policy. You are going to guess which database I am deploying. Deployed it into one particular region.

You can see I have a choice. MySQL, Postgres or even Microsoft SQL Server. We can deploy and manage SQL Server instances too. So I am going to select Postgres and IT thinks that the only secured versions that have gone through their quality pipeline are versions fourteen and fifteen and you can allow minor versions of them. But they’re the only ones that right now are through the certification process and approved.

So we’re going to make that available. But at this point, everything is available. Database as a service, you’ll notice that the data services is now an installed service ready for that tenant. Every tenant looks like this. Each of the tenants you can decide what are the right services that get deployed for each of them.

It’s as easy as that. That is what a cloud looks like. That is a big change. So So now to walk us through the developer experience, please welcome on stage our senior VCF technical lead, Sabina Anya.

Steven Flaherty, Global Head of Infrastructure, Barclays0: Good morning, everybody. Let’s have a little bit of fun. In this scenario, my team is responsible for the legal oversight application at the large enterprise. You can tell I’m one of the developers. This application helps us move faster without any compliance issues.

Now before we ship a new feature, maybe a self driving capability, a new data sharing model, or even an update to how we store things like customer contracts, we need to know, is this even legally allowed in every country you operate in? Now, this is what this app does. It connects to a knowledge base of regulations, queries, an AI model, and gives us a green, yellow, or red light based on region, product, and especially legal risk. Now, to build it, I’m gonna need a few things. I’m gonna need a front end.

I’m gonna need a Postgres database. I’m gonna need a GenAI back end to evaluate all of this data, and a set of Kubernetes services, clusters for the components of the application, and a model runtime managed in my harbor model gallery. But here’s the key. I don’t want to wait weeks to get infrastructure provisioned. I don’t want to write tickets for load balancers or firewalls and for it still not to work.

I want infrastructure to be code. Now, as a developer, this is my starting point. All the services I need, databases, Kubernetes, load balancers, even private AI, are right here ready to use. I have project spaces for my development and production versions of my applications. Inside the production project, I can spin up an application namespace for deploying my app.

In the application namespace, I’ll just fill in the basics. App name, region, and class. The platform enforces the right policies behind the scenes. Now, I can place my app across different availability zones. Each zone is an independent fault domain with separate power, network, and infrastructure.

It’s the same model the public cloud uses and now I get that resilience in my private cloud. Now, I’ve chosen multiple zones here so I get resilience without ever needing to touch the infrastructure. And I can select the level of isolation by choosing either a virtual private cloud that’s dedicated or shared. Now, everything is in place for my application. From here, I’m gonna shift to code because my deployment is automatic through Git.

Let’s go ahead and look at that application a little bit. I’m back in my ID. This is home based for me. I’m defining everything the app needs in code. And as a developer, I’ve mentioned it before, I don’t want to open tickets.

I don’t want to be bounced around around different IT teams. I don’t wanna hear the person is on holiday. I wanna declare my security policies in YAML with what traffic to allow, what to block, and the platform will enforce it automatically. I’m defining my Postgres cluster. There’s no need to deploy and configure a database.

IT has set it up for me as a service. I have replication, storage, backup schedules, all of them captured in code. Now, all of this means consistency every time with resilience built in. Now, this is GitOps. Right?

The work is just code commit. The update is tracked. It’s reviewed. It’s reproducible. That’s it.

You get eight YAML files, firewall rules, database configs, cluster settings, front end deployment. All of this is versioned together. And when I push, Git automation will take over. The platform will deploy the app. It applies the policies, provisions the database.

It’s infrastructure as code, just like I expect. That’s a lot going on there. So it’s also quick. So what just happened? ArgoCD saw my git change.

This is my CICD pipeline. My application, legal oversight. Remember the contracts review? That was out of sync and auto sync kicked in. The desired state includes web service deployment, security policy, dev cluster references, and a postgres cluster.

The result, my app is healthy. My sync is okay. My front end pods are running one out of one. From commit to a secured, fully running application and database, automated and audible with GitOps. Now once Argo’s done syncing, this is where I’ll go next.

I’m going to come back into the platform because I want to get a view of how the app is performing. Things like CPU, memory, even cost. This is scoped directly to my application. If something spikes, I have direct visibility into the app, its resources, and its context. Now, what is developer autonomy at the end of the day?

Defining my application and code. Pushing to git and the platform helping me helping me taking it from there. I get to stay in familiar tools, things I’m used to, Versus Code, GitHub, and I get to consume approved services from the catalog. And at the end, I see everything in one place. So that is the developer view.

We’re now gonna go back to the admin view and hand it back to Paul.

Paul Turner: Wow. Isn’t it great to hear an excited, happy developer? I mean, I’m the IT guy. They used to think of me as the Department of Motor Vehicles. Yes, the DMV, as quick as that.

Not anymore, not anymore. So thank you, Sabina for that. I should have said that at the very beginning, but anyhow. But here’s let’s go back to the admin view. Here again, full visibility into it.

I can see the quotas. I can see the region usage, memory disk. I can see the clusters, the databases used. I can see most importantly costing. So let’s drill into the legal application, right?

We’ve just deployed that. You can see that on a particular basis, I can see the actual growth and trends over time of how that usage has been and you can see the growth in that usage. But I can also drill down into the containers and the VMs that are used by that applications. So this isn’t just about chargeback, costback and how can we actually allow empowered developers and better resource management. All of that is true.

But I also get full visibility into the application. Imagine how that helps you on diagnostics, working with your application teams, things have gone wrong, how to actually root cause issues, amazing. So what you’ve seen is the accelerated path to production. You’ve seen from the IT side, the complete control that they need to manage their environments and you’ve seen the developer, the happy developer, Sabina, happy developer because she’s got what she needed, automated delivery of applications, get based pipelines, CICD delivery. This is a big sea change, the accelerated path to production.

But that’s one area. So for the next investment area, Private AI as a Service, please welcome on stage Chris Wolfe.

Steven Flaherty, Global Head of Infrastructure, Barclays1: Alright. TikTok, we got a lot to go get over in this conference, so I’m gonna get right to it. And I want to start off with the legal oversight app that you’ve already seen. And now here’s the thing. Our worlds are never perfect.

Right? You saw this great scenario, but like, come on. Like in your world, something always goes wrong. And this is where I’m happy to share with you the VCF Intelligent Assistant. So VCF Intelligent Assist is an AI integrated chatbot where you can ask questions, you can start to get help and more easily resolve any of the support challenges that you might run into.

So in this case, we’re gonna go ahead and start to ask about like, you know, our legal oversight app, we’re running into some performance challenges. What are some things that you might suggest? We get some responses here. Okay. You know, private AI GPU dashboard, that’s a pretty good place to take a look.

Cool. So how am I going to get to that? So let’s find that out. So let’s go ahead and head over to the dashboard in VCF operations. And surprise, right?

We got a red area. There’s a problem here. We got a hotspot. We want to be able to load balance this. But this is an AI application.

So is this something that I can be motioned to rebalance out my cluster? Let’s go back to the chat assistant and let’s find out. So here we go here. Now we’re getting more information. And notice what you’re seeing in terms of the sources here for our explainability.

It’s our docs. It’s our KB articles. It’s even blogs. So yes, of course, we’re also indexing William Lamb’s blog. So don’t worry.

We got you covered. So we go from here now. We can see that we can do this. Let’s go to our vSphere client. The vMotion completes.

And these are large language models, large GPUs, major datasets. We can vMotion AI workloads just like anything else which is pretty freaking cool. So we go back to VCF operations dashboard, lo and behold, things are looking great. So this is the first thing I wanted to share with you. There’s a lot more to come here.

I wanted to step back though and talk about Broadcom because people often ask, what’s Broadcom’s leadership role in artificial intelligence? What’s Broadcom about? And we could break it down into a couple of key points. When you think about open ecosystems, you should be thinking about Broadcom. Our Ethernet business and Ethernet is back ending the largest AI hyperscalers in the world today.

You think about Broadcom, you should think about interoperability. You look at VMware Cloud Foundation. You look at the choice of hardware that you have below the stack for your AI workloads and the choice of models and services you have above the stack. So when you’re trying to bet on an uncertain future, the best place to bet with and the best partner for you is going to be Broadcom. Now I’m happy to share more work that we’ve done with NVIDIA as our partners.

When you look at those open ecosystems, NVIDIA has been key to our AI journey for a number of years. And you see a number of announcements here that we’re happy to share with you today. This includes additional GPU support, so the Blackwell V200s, the RTX Pro 6,000 GPUs, ConnectX7 and BlueField three NICs. This gives you DirectPath IO, gives you GPU Direct RDMA, GPU Direct Storage, GPU pass through support as well. And then finally, something you may not be aware of is our HGX reference architecture.

A lot of you are consuming AI infrastructure or purchasing AI infrastructure through your OEMs and you’re buying that HDX form factor. Well, you can put VCF on that, extract all the value and move forward as well. Now it doesn’t just stop there. Last year, we announced our partnership with Intel and Gaudi three support. And I’m happy to share with you today that we’re taking that ecosystem one step further with support and a partnership with AMD as well.

So we will have virtualization enablement and support for the MI350 GPUs going forward. This has given you the enterprise software stack and that open ecosystem around this as well. So again, more choice for you. And again, this has given you your choice of accelerators and anything that you’re looking to do with AI now and in the future. Now if I pause, it was three years ago, time flies, three years ago we introduced private AI at this conference on this stage.

And what’s happened since then? The world has caught on to the notion that you can bring your models to wherever the data resides. You can run those models at a lower cost without having to sacrifice privacy or control of your data. This isn’t just our vision anymore. Even the hyperscalers are doing it too.

We’re happy to have them with us on this journey, but where we differentiate is we are committed to choice of AI models and services, choice of hardware going forward. So you’re not having to buy all of these siloed AI appliances. You can bet with us on a common AI platform and that’s going to just enable and unlock choice now and in the future. Now customers have been on this journey with us as well, and I’m happy to share that over the past year, we’ve onboarded more than 80 customers. This includes a lot of household names and several of these, they’re partners.

They’re here with us today. So I’d like to thank Mark. Ram is here. Keith is here. So this is US Senate Federal Credit Union, University of Texas, University of Bristol.

Again, a lot of good momentum across a large number of industry verticals and that’s continuing to move forward at a really fast pace. Now innovation hasn’t stopped there either. There’s a lot more here. So some key things I want to highlight. We’ve shown you some of the things that we’re doing in infrastructure already and our core platform is really going to continue to unlock a lot of that flexibility for you.

New innovations coming is not just model context protocol, but ensuring that you have a secure identity chain, ensuring that you have secure role based access controls as you’re bringing these different data feeds into your AI services. Our multi accelerator model runtime, this means you can deploy a model once, I can change accelerators. This could be AMD GPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, even CPUs and I will not have to refactor my application. And then finally, with multi tenant models as a service, I can load a single copy of a model into one or more GPUs. I can share that among multiple lines of business or multiple tenants while keeping all of the data private.

This will further lower your costs for AI services as you run them internally and it gives you the equivalent of what the hyperscalers are doing in the public cloud. Now how many of you are saying, Chris, this is amazing. Like, how do I get it? How do I get it? You might also be saying, you know what?

I have that special someone. The holidays are around the corner. They seem to have everything. What should I do? I got the answer for you.

We are now bundling private AI services in VCF nine point zero. That’s what I’m talking about. Let’s go. Let’s go. Yeah.

Now I’ve kind of given you the taste of it. I want to give you the full meal now. There’s no better person to show you how all of these services work than the engineering leader whose team has built these. I’d like to welcome Tasha Drew to the stage.

Steven Flaherty, Global Head of Infrastructure, Barclays2: Thanks, Chris, and hi, everybody. Today, I am super excited to give you a quick tour of some of the capabilities of Private AI services and a behind the scenes look at how we are using those services to deliver Intelligent Assist for VMware Cloud Foundation which Chris just demoed to you. The first service we’re going to look at is Model Gallery. As your organization scales its AI workloads, your developers are going to want access to the latest cutting edge upstream and open source models. This introduces an immediate enterprise governance problem the Model Gallery service is designed to solve.

This service gives you tooling and workflows to safely connect to popular model registries on the Internet, download models and then security scan and validate the behavior of those models. Once you are satisfied in the model’s provenance, we repackage the model for you so you can upload it to your internal model gallery and share it with the appropriate teams and users using your organization’s role based access control. Here you can see my team’s model gallery for Intelligent Assist and some of the other services we are developing. Now that you have models safely imported and shared, you’re going to want to be able to deploy those models as a service for your organization. To help you with that, we’ve developed the model runtime service.

From directly within VCF, you can select the model you want to deploy, pass in specific runtime flags and you’re off to the races. Here you can see my team deploying the Quen3 embedding model, which is what we’re using for Intelligent Assist. And on the right hand side of the screen, the YAML documents are being automatically created so that you can save this deployment in your CI system for quick and easy recreation. Your deployed models are running behind the ML API gateway. Your users continue to interact with the model via the APIs they are used to but you have the operational flexibility to scale models up and down horizontally based on load or do a rolling upgrade with no end user impact.

Now that you have models as a service running, your users are going to want to use those models to deliver retrieval augmented generation application or RAG apps. In this architectural pattern, developers instruct a model to compose its answers only using a set of documents that have been provided to it. However, when we talked to our customers, we found that while they saw tremendous value in RagApps, they were struggling to reliably get their documents out of where they were stored and correctly processed and stored in a vector database. To meet this challenge, we built the data indexing and retrieval service. This service provides data connectors for popular document locations like Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint and Confluence.

You can select which documents or folders should be provided in a knowledge base for the Rag app and we take care of processing those documents. You can also set a regular refresh policy to make sure your AI applications data stays fresh as the original documents are updated. Here you can see the documents my team has processed for the Intelligent Assist. The final service I’m going to highlight today is AgentBuilder. AgentBuilder is a higher level service you can provide to your developers and data scientists where they can come to a UI, see the models you’re running for them and some knowledge bases that are available to them to use.

Users can then provide specific prompt instructions to the model, manage their tools and knowledge based settings and quickly test out the agent they’ve created allowing for a fast inner development loop. Once you’re happy with the agent you’ve created, here you can see us testing out the Intelligence Assist for Chris’ demo, your agent is saved and you can use it as a back end service to power your Thanks for going on this quick tour of Private AI with me. If you’d like to learn more about how to deploy and use these services, please check out this blog for step by step instructions. Now back to you, Paul.

Paul Turner: Thank you, Tasha. Private AI Foundation is now included. How about that? But there’s a third area, cyber resilient data. And security resilience is no longer a checkbox.

It’s imperative. We’ve seen it across industry, one breach, one outage, one ransomware hit and suddenly it’s not your systems at risk, it’s your customers, your IP, your reputation, even your license to operate. Marks and Spencer’s back in May had a $440,000,000 loss, weeks of downtime online and in store. A leading technology company Snowflake had a credential attack. It impacted 165 companies that were using their service.

And government and public sector isn’t immune to this either. The US National Government public database had 2,900,000,000 records, probably all of your records, social security numbers, usernames, passwords and more. Billions of records, billions of losses. VCF is your secure foundation. Built into the platform today, we already have multifactor authentication, encryption at rest and in motion, secure network zoning, live patching so you can update from those CVEs and much, much more.

We extend that with our vDefend and Avi work which looks at runtime security. How do I protect applications and look at actually what’s happening on the network and in real time it’s zero trust security, deep threat visibility and web app protection meeting your PCI and HIPAA compliance needs. And of course, Artanzu, I’ve got to protect the developer pipeline. We can do that. We cannot just help you protect it.

We can make sure that CVE remediations are done with ease because you can push code with ease. You can implement guardrails within your applications and full automated builds and service controls. But we’re not stopping there. I said we’re innovating. I’m announcing today our new VCF advanced cyber compliance.

This new extension to VCF provides a very, very powerful capability, complete continuous compliance enforcement, not just for your VCF environment, but more importantly for your applications. Okay, based on our SALT technology, but fully available for all of you. We have enhanced platform security, looking at how do we protect the resiliency of the platform itself, secure by design container images, confidential computing built in across AMD and Intel based environments and we do proactive assessments to monitor and maintain your environment for you. And of course, if things go wrong, full automated ransomware and data recovery. All of our VLR live recovery capability is part of this advanced cyber compliance.

So you can do disaster recovery and compliance recovery sorry, and clean room recovery. So we’ve covered a lot. You’ve seen all the work that we’re doing on engineering the next generation of VCF. But we’re not just talking about VCF this week. There is a whole load more information.

As I like to say in Ireland, there’s a shit ton more information that you’re actually going to hear about this week and hopefully you enjoy it. But it’s really, really exciting times. But while we think about it, we’ve covered a lot, innovation in the data center, innovation for AI, innovation for security. And we’ve heard from customers, just like all of you, who are building their private cloud and seeing real results. But before you go, I want to kind of share with you one thing.

Standing here today, I kind of think of the journey we’ve been on together. Twenty five years ago, when we introduced server virtualization, people thought we were crazy. Why would you want to share a server? But you, all of you, the people in this room, you saw the potential. You transformed server economics forever.

You transform the data center through encapsulation and standardization of applications. But we didn’t stop there. We extended virtualization to networking and storage, delivering on the promise of the software defined data center. Again, we had our doubters, but all of you proved them wrong. You redefined the data center making it more flexible, more efficient, more resilient, software defined.

And now we’re at the next inflection point, the modern private cloud, an agile, secure and cost efficient cloud for all applications deployed anywhere. And you, you’re not just IT practitioners. You’re the architects of the future. You’re writing the next chapter of the data center. So remember this, you’re not just implementing technology.

Together, we are redefining IT. Thank you for being here and have a great week.

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