This year, New Belgium Brewing Company Inc. is raising a glass to private cloud.

Since VMware by Broadcom rolled out VMware Cloud Foundation 9 in 2024, customers such as New Belgium Brewing have tapped into VCF’s private cloud platform. It’s helped the beverage company make adopting artificial intelligence a lot smoother.

New Belgium Brewing Company’s Adam Little and Broadcom’s Krish Prasad discuss their companies partnership.

“You’ve got to pick an area of your business where you have good, clean data to have AI help you make better decisions with that,” said Adam Little (pictured, left), director of IT operations at New Belgium Brewing. “For us, in a manufacturing space, we do have a lot of telemetry. We were doing IoT before anyone called it IoT. We have really good supply chain data. That’s an opportunity.”

Little and Krish Prasad (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom Inc., spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Rebecca Knight at VMware Explore, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how New Belgium Brewing uses AI and its partnership with VMware. (* Disclosure below.)

Picking a private cloud strategy

AI adoption is not the classic information technology playbook. Customers may have concerns about putting critical data in the cloud or how to go about integrating AI capabilities into their normal operations.

“Our medium and smaller customers are moving much faster in deploying the cloud,” Prasad said. “One of our customers, Grinnell Insurance, they’re a smaller company—they were the first ones to actually deploy VCF 9 and they deployed the entire platform, and they have delivered a full private cloud to their end users.”

New Belgium Brewing has applied VCF 9 to running AI at the edge, helping its employees make more informed decisions. For example, an AI device might monitor the pH or yeast levels and then use previous data to suggest a course of action. The most important thing, according to Little, is to pick what’s best for your business.

“You can consolidate into one big data center or you can consolidate at the edge,” he said. “In  manufacturing, we tend to lean toward edge and distributed, but it is interesting to hear customers, big banks, that say, ‘Hey, I had 40 data centers and I now have seven,’ that’s enabled them to bring that footprint down.”

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