VMware looks to help customers ditch the public cloud to address cost, complexity and compliance
LAS VEGAS—VMware Explore kicked off today and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan made crystal clear that Vmware by Broadcom is a very different company. Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023. Since then, “We’ve been hearing lots…You’re telling us you want our products to work better and be more user-friendly. You want them to actually work together. You’re asking us—you’re asking me particularly—roll up your sleeves, do the hard work…That’s exactly what we’ve done.”
Apparently referencing pushback around price hikes and product bundling, Tan said customers will definitely see a change. But, “Sorry,” he said. “We’re serious business people. So are you. 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.” Tan covers this in more depth in this blog post.
Tracking the evolving IT landscape, Tan recalled that a decade ago the push was to put any and all workloads into the public cloud. “Because of this,” he said, “I see you’re all now suffering from PTSD. You’re confronting the three Cs of public cloud,” cost, complexity and compliance. All three are better addressed, Tan said, by bringing workloads back on-premises.
“Here’s my view,” he continued. “The future of the enterprise, your enterprises, is private. Private cloud, private AI, fueled by your own private data. It’s about staying on prem and in control.” Public cloud will still play a role in supporting elastic demand and bursting workloads, but “in this hybrid world, the private cloud is now the platform to drive your business and your innovation,” Tan said. “And we have work to do to make that happen.”
Tan referenced impediments represented by silos across compute, storage and networking—”You’re very siloed. You’re so screwed because silos don’t work well together and it’s painful for you to deliver services to your internal customers.”—but said VMware has the solution in its latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) release, and attendant services, including private AI, data services, container operations, disaster recovery, advanced security, load balancing, edge orchestration and workload automation.”
He likened the “rich catalog of services” running on VCF as “getting AWS on prem.”
Talking through the post-acquisition product catalog simplification. In fact, Tan said, VMware has gone from offering 8,000 SKUs to “four core offerings. That’s all you need.”
With VCF 9, Broadcom reckons users could see a 34% reduction infrastructure costs and around a 42% reduction in cost of operations, according to the company. In terms of spinning up new virtual machines (VMs), the company sees 61% faster time to deployment. Along with faster provisioning of network capacity and faster storage, enterprises could see “an overall 564% three-year ROI and 10 months to payback.”
