A new era of private cloud innovation is here, and all eyes are on VMware following its game-changing acquisition by Broadcom Inc. in late 2023.

Understanding the long-term strategy for the VMware Cloud Foundation in the artificial intelligence and multicloud era was a central focus of this week’s VMware Cloud Foundation Transformed event. The broadcast was a chance to understand how a new table is being set for VMware, according to theCUBE Research Executive Analyst John Furrier.

Industry analysts John Furrier, Christophe Bertrand, Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay talk about private cloud innovation during the VMware Cloud Foundation Transformed event.

“Broadcom, a 10-for-1 stock split — everyone’s kind of high-fiving each other, certainly on the VMware side. They joined the right team,” Furrier said. “The semiconductor business is booming. But VMware’s transitioning, and the smoke is starting to clear a little bit now.”

Analysts for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, spoke with industry professionals during the event about private cloud innovation. They explored use cases in private AI and provided insights on VMware’s future. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three key insights you may have missed from the VMware Cloud Foundation Transformed event:

1. VMware’s roadmap is focused on private cloud innovation.

The roadmap for VMware involves cloud infrastructure innovations and private AI. Understanding the landscape for the company today is a threefold approach, according to Christophe Bertrand, principal analyst at theCUBE Research.

John Furrier, and Christophe Bertrand discuss VMware’s approach to private cloud innovation.

“On the partner side, they have clearly reorganized themselves, looked at adopting the Broadcom program, cleaned up a bunch of complex licensing questions for both end users and cloud service partners,” Bertrand said. “I think that’s really very powerful.”

On the product side, the big challenge and opportunity has to do with integration. That’s not only internally between the various components of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), but also externally, Bertrand added.

“That’s going to be absolutely key to the ecosystem,” he said. “Then, obviously gen AI and AI. Big topic, and they certainly have a great card to play if they can deliver on this integration.”

When it comes to the VCF approach to private cloud innovation, announced changes were necessary in order to bring everything together, according to Rob Strechay, principal analyst at theCUBE Research. That includes a new approach to Kubernetes.

“Kubernetes used to be, I wouldn’t say second-class citizen, but it used to be a plugin on top of what is now VCF,” Strechay said. “Bringing it in as a first-class citizen, being part of it, managing everything the same, same observability, same workflow, being able to do the clusters at scale, definitely gives them a better play.”

For VCF, the big bet being made is that enterprises will adopt VCF private cloud innovation. But the VMware Cloud Foundation was always the underpinning of on-prem cloud, according to Dave Vellante, chief analyst at theCUBE Research.

“Now, as we move to training outside of the cloud, can it be the underpinning of private AI, AI on-prem? And that’s the strategy,” Vellante said.

Understanding and addressing customer adoption barriers will be crucial. By removing these obstacles and following a clear roadmap, customers can effectively train and run models with inference both on-premises and at the edge. That’s the strategy for success, Vellante pointed out.

“I think it’s a clean strategy,” he said. “It’s simplified the licensing model, so that makes sense. Leaving enough meat on the bone for the partners, and now it’s game on.”

Here’s the complete video interview with theCUBE’s analyst team:

2. There’s a bet on private AI and hybrid cloud.

When it comes to Broadcom’s vision for private AI, it’s all about privacy, partnerships and platform flexibility. When the company laid out its plans, what it was betting on was that privacy and control of data really mattered to customers, according to Chris Wolf, global head of AI and advanced services, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, at Broadcom.

Broadcom’s Chris Wolf talks to theCUBE about Broadcom’s vision for private AI.

“Even last summer, we had some real insights in terms of operating AI services in an enterprise data center, because we were doing that ourselves,” he said. “We were seeing that some of our internal services were roughly one-third the cost of comparable public cloud services. We knew we were onto something that wasn’t just about getting these benefits, but you were getting a lower cost as well.”

A team-up with Nvidia Corp. created the Private AI Foundation, which is now generally available. These days, things are moving so fast that companies can’t rely on a single platform or a single solution, according to Wolf.

“We said we need to take a platform approach, bet on an AI infrastructure platform that’s going to give you some optionality so that as something changes, you can quickly adopt it,” Wolf said. “To give you an example, one of our top internal AI services, we’ve changed the foundation model three times in the last nine months, just because we keep getting better results. The platform approach is what gives you that agility, and that’s a key reason why folks are betting on us.”

Watch theCUBE’s complete interview with Chris Wolf here.

Meanwhile, the number one thing that customers have been telling VMware is that they are starting to take a much more balanced approach to their cloud journey, according to Krish Prasad (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of the VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom. Broadcom’s partnership with VMware has helped to turbocharge hybrid cloud.

“A hybrid model is what customers have been focused on, and that’s where they want our solutions to enable them to deploy that infrastructure model for their IT,” Prasad said. “Our focus has been really to deliver a cloud platform to the customers that you can run on-prem, you can run with service providers or the hyperscalers so that customers can have a managed environment coming from the public clouds and then have their own private cloud that connects to each other with the same foundation underneath it.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Krish Prasad:

3. Products and partnerships are a big part of the strategy.

The VMware Cloud Foundation Transformed event was also a chance to learn more about products within the VCF portfolio. The latest VCF releases highlighted tighter integration of networking, storage and management.

VCF delivers virtualized infrastructure through vSphere, as well as virtualized networking through NSX and virtualized storage using vSAN. It’s necessary to integrate those products and make them work, make them easy and lifecycle them so customers can run them at scale, according to Paul Turner, vice president of product management for vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, at Broadcom.

Broadcom’s Paul Turner talks with theCUBE at the VMware Cloud Foundation Transformed event.

“What we did is we took all of those groups within VMware and we said, ‘Build it, bring them together, bring the teams together, execute in a plan and really deliver an integrated private cloud experience.’ That’s what we’ve done,” Turner said.

Watch theCUBE’s complete interview with Paul Turner here.

Partnerships, meanwhile, are being seen as crucial to success. The VMware Cloud Foundation has solidified a unified partner ecosystem under the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program.

“The key to our go-to-market is simplification. Since the acquisition completion with Broadcom, we have been on this journey for simplifying things,” said Ahmar Mohammad, vice president of partners, managed services and solutions go to market, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, at Broadcom. “When it comes to simplifying things, especially on our partner ecosystem as well, it’s establishing clear swim lanes to make sure that we are operating or we are working with each of those partners in those swim lanes.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Ahmar Mohammad:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the VMware Cloud Foundation Transformed event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the VMware Cloud Foundation Transformed event. Neither VMware by Broadcom, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE