Broadcom Inc. is doubling down on velocity to help enterprises meet rising demands from artificial intelligence-driven applications and increasingly complex data environments. Central to that strategy is its Tanzu Platform, which has been refocused to unify application and data efforts across enterprise stacks.

Broadcom’s Purnima Padmanabhan talks with theCUBE about Tanzu’s sharpened focus and new platform updates.

The company has carved out a more specialized role for Tanzu, removing infrastructure responsibilities. Its mission is now honed around accelerating outcomes at the app and data layer, according to Purnima Padmanabhan (pictured), general manager of Tanzu Division at Broadcom.

“Tanzu is doing very well as a business,” she told theCUBE. “We have excellent customer traction, and we have a strong, rationalized portfolio set. Over the last year, we have refined and focused, as is the key with anything that Broadcom and Hock [Tan] does.”

Padmanabhan spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Paul Nashawaty at VMware Explore, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Tanzu’s sharpened focus, new platform updates and the broader implications for enterprise app and data strategies. (* Disclosure below.)

A streamlined stack: How the Tanzu Platform unifies apps and data

That refined focus is more than organizational. Broadcom consolidated all Kubernetes and runtime components into VMware Cloud Foundation, allowing Tanzu to center its full energy on the application and data layers, according to Padmanabhan. By reducing distraction, the Tanzu Platform can now deliver with greater clarity and speed.

“Our business is thriving,” she said. “We are not focused on any infrastructure components. We are a hundred percent focused on [the] application and data layer. We just did our advisory board with customers and they said, ‘We are blown away by the level of innovation you have been able to put in.'”

That innovation includes two major updates: Tanzu Platform 10.3 and the newly announced Tanzu Data Intelligence. The first provides a rapid development framework for enterprise applications, enabling teams to build and deploy in hours instead of months, according to Padmanabhan. AI is embedded directly into the Tanzu Platform experience, with model brokering, tooling integrations and built-in security controls for enterprise developers.

“Let me connect both the dots here,” she said. “AI has truly created a jump ball for application and data stacks as never before … We believe the winners in the enterprise are the ones that bring app data and AI stack together with safety, governance and compliance. That is what Tanzu does. Our mission has stayed the same. It is all about accelerating business velocity by accelerating application velocity.”

Tanzu Data Intelligence complements the Platform by enabling a lakehouse-style approach to data across structured and unstructured sources, Padmanabhan explained. Based on Greenplum, the system includes a single query layer and federated access to multiple data locations, including S3, Structured Query Language and Oracle Corp. systems. Enterprises can maintain data sovereignty while supporting AI workloads on-premises. Both the Tanzu Platform and Data Intelligence also run natively on VCF, supporting integrated workloads in consistent environments.

“I think the thing is from a paradigm perspective,” Padmanabhan said. “Snowflake and Databricks are trying to do the same thing, but it’s a very different paradigm. They’re trying to put everything in the cloud. What our value proposition always has been … VMware Broadcom brand has been [a] private cloud brand … and what it is … is sovereignty. It is safety, it is security. But … the biggest one that comes up is cost and cost predictability.”

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

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE