Under Chief Executive Officer Raghu Raghuram, VMware Inc. is entering a new era. During VMware Explore 2023, he discussed databases and workflows being built on top of them.

This is happening now, and it has given a boost to the whole application sector, according to Purnima Padmanabhan (pictured), senior vice president and general manager at VMware. It has also brought forward an opportunity: how best to use generative artificial intelligence in solutions to make things easier for customers, including platform engineers, developers and operations teams.

“That is basically using conversational AI,” Padmanabhan said. “You heard a whole bunch of announcements, Tanzu Intelligent Assist. I’m sitting on a pool of data with my management solutions, right? Logs, metrics, traces, application information. How do I make sense of all of that?”

Padmanabhan discussed those possible solutions with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Rob Strechay at VMware Explore 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed curating environments and VMware’s broader AI goals. (* Disclosure below.)

Conversational terms

When it comes to logs, metrics, traces and application information, the key is making it available in a conversational term, according to Padmanabhan. One could say, “Where is my application?” or “What is the problem, and how should I fix it?” as questions to the assistant.

That’s one pool of solutions, but the second opportunity is in curating an environment. During VMware Explore, Raghuram laid out the Private AI Foundation, but then it’s also worth asking how one creates an application foundation, according to Padmanabhan.

“Out of the box, I have accelerators that tell me, ‘You want MLflow, you want Spring, and you want the following LangChain, the following LLM models,’” she said. “That’s all I pick, and everything gets curated for me. So that is what we are going for with the Tanzu Application Platform.”

The goal for Tanzu is for it to become the broader application acceleration brand, according to Padmanabhan. That means whether it is a microservices-based application landing on private or public cloud, whether it’s an AI application or whether it’s a chatbot, VMware’s goal is for customers to come to Tanzu to accelerate their applications.

When considering the larger application ecosystem, the company points to its management hub and management solutions. But often management is thought about after the fact, after applications are built, and then cost performance and security are done, according to Padmanabhan.

“We said what happens when I’m developing an app? I need to know the cost of my app. I need to know how it might perform. I need to instrument everything while I’m developing. And we need to give this data to the coders,” she said. “The shift left. What happens when I’m operating the application, when I’m deploying it to Kubernetes or when I’m deploying it to even VM? I need to know how it would look like.”

Fundamentally, that’s how the company began to view Tanzu Hub, formerly Aria Hub, as not just a post-the-fact construct, but something that needed to be pulled and shifted left all the way, according to Padmanabhan. So, the company expanded the Tanzu portfolio.

“[We did that] to say truly it’s about being able to develop, operate and optimize applications through their entire lifecycle, all the way from its creation to its optimization,” she said. “We would have the Hub be the anchor that always gives you that state of the union. What is my application, what is it depending, and how is it performing?”

Here’s the complete video interview with Purnima Padmanabhan, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore 2023:

(* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE