The focus of VMware Inc. at its annual Explore conference in Las Vegas this week was on two central areas: generative artificial intelligence and multicloud.

The company made several significant announcements in both during the event, including an expanded partnership with Nvidia Corp. designed to allow customers to run AI services adjacent to data with the goal of preserving data privacy. The news highlighted a turning of the page for VMware as it seeks to help organizations leverage generative AI in virtualized infrastructure.

“I look at it as a beginning of a brand-new chapter in our evolution,” said Krish Prasad (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager for cloud platform business at VMware. “The killer application that is driving it is the generative AI stuff. All of the work we have done on the infrastructure layer with Nvidia to provide accelerated computing, all of that is coming together to support the new generation of applications that are powered by generative AI. As we are ending one chapter, we are actually starting the next big chapter in the application world.”

Prasad spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Rob Strechay at VMware Explore 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Prashanth Shenoy (left), vice president of product and technical marketing of the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware, and they discussed VMware’s news from the conference and what it will mean for enterprise customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Single multicloud platform

Part of VMware’s message is that in the new reality that encompasses generative AI for the enterprise and a desire to operate in multiple clouds, finding people with the skillset to handle a diverse infrastructure can be a challenge. The company is focused on making this a simpler proposition for customers.

“A challenge that our customers see is the skillset,” Shenoy said. “There are very, very few folks in the world here who are an Azure, Amazon, Google, IBM, VMware expert to stitch all this together. A lot of focus on us is to truly create that single, multicloud platform.”

That platform received further definition this week with the unveiling of new tools to simplify multicloud management. VMware’s approach is to offer solutions that go beyond a mere abstraction layer on hyperscaler infrastructure, according to Prasad.

“The way we run in these clouds is different from setting up an abstraction on top of their software,” he noted. “We are running on metal from AWS, metal in AVS, metal in Google, running essentially the VMware Cloud Foundation. We have a set of hybrid cloud services for operations, for developer consumption, that run on top of this in a consistent way across all the endpoints at the same time. So, you have a unified experience for customers to then access all of these clouds.”

In this new chapter for the evolution of VMware, the company has been deliberate in expanding its partner ecosystem, as seen in the joint announcement with Nvidia and its alliances with the major cloud providers.

“When we provide a very open ecosystem, the route to market also needs to be pretty broad and wide,” Shenoy said. “Having the broad ecosystem, whether it’s our hyperscalers, whether it’s our cloud service providers, whether it’s our GSIs, whether it’s our direct sales, is really going to help build that.”

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

(* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for VMware Explore 2023. VMware Inc. and other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE