While it’s commonplace for tech companies to collaborate, there are always areas in which they fiercely compete.

Today, one of the key competition areas is artificial intelligence. AI is bleeding into every aspect of the enterprise and forcing a rethink of the contemporary approach to cloud use and application delivery.

“Ultimately, the way we look at it is [that] in today’s world, business agility comes from software agility,” said Purnima Padmanabhan (pictured), senior vice president and general manager at VMware Inc. “So, customers must have the ability to accelerate their application delivery to production. What we have done is put together a solution under the Tanzu umbrella that allows customers to accelerate their application delivery by helping them develop, operate and optimize their applications and deliver them to any cloud, any Kubernetes, anywhere.”

Padmanabhan spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed VMware’s position and strategies in accelerating application delivery amidst the dynamic shifts in the enterprise landscape. (* Disclosure below.)

Integrating AI into today’s accelerated app delivery ethos

Digital operations are an integral part of the current business landscape. For companies to remain agile, scalable and responsive, their cloud and software operations must be astute. But AI has emerged as a pivotal piece in that software delivery puzzle. Companies are increasingly demanding its integration into several aspects of their app lifecycles while ensuring the safety and compliance of the applications.

It has become crucial to maintain a disciplined application platform, with clear paths to production, to accelerate the adoption of AI within applications, according to Padmanabhan.

“One of the things that customers want is also to incorporate artificial intelligence into their applications [to] provide better customer service and better intelligence around data that they may have,” she explained. “To do that, [companies must] not only incorporate that in a fast and efficient way, but also make sure that it stays safe and within guardrails — that the right set of data is used.”

There’s also the concept of AI accelerators built into the Tanzu portfolio. These accelerators are templatized approaches aimed at expediting the integration of AI into applications. By leveraging tools like the Spring AI project, VMware facilitates the seamless connection to various models with a consistent API, expediting the process of integrating AI into applications, Padmanabhan explained.

“We surround this application platform with manageability — you have to consider manageability while you are building applications,” she said. “How are you going to secure it, scale it and make sure it’s performant and cost-effective? That is the Tanzu Intelligence portfolio. The Tanzu platform surrounded by Tanzu data and intelligence is the portfolio. Now, when you start thinking about something like AI and how you accelerate AI, what we have done is we have started curating what we call AI accelerators.”

VMware has also built capabilities into the Tanzu platform to enhance the user experience and insights generation processes. Tanzu Hub and Graph, coupled with generative AI, provide a comprehensive understanding of multicloud universes, enabling users to glean actionable insights from complex data, according to Padmanabhan.

Meeting the challenges of a hybrid cloud world

Hybrid cloud is today’s de-facto enterprise operating standard. With data scattered across on-premises, edge and public cloud environments, platform teams and developers alike have to grapple with complex workflow challenges. For AWS-reliant users, VMware is addressing these challenges by playing nice with core AWS services and ensuring seamless connectivity between Tanzu application platforms and AWS, thereby simplifying the path to production, Padmanabhan explained.

“One of the things that we bring in bring to the table for AWS customers is, first of all, we have added extensive support for core AWS services, including lifecycle management of the core infrastructure, which is EKS,” she said. “Then we connect it to our Tanzu Application Platform so that as customers build their golden paths to production, define the set of capabilities on how to build, how to test [and] how to scale, these can be seamlessly delivered to the AWS platform.”

The role of data services in the modern app development landscape is critical. VMware’s enhancements to Greenplum and the introduction of a centralized management layer enable efficient data management and integration into application pipelines, Padmanabhan concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE