The biggest topic covered at this year’s VMware Explore event centered on computer chipmaker Broadcom Inc.’s planned acquisition of VMware Inc., marking a significant new era for the virtualization pioneer.

It is a time of major change, according to theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante (pictured, right) in a recent edition of his Breaking Analysis series. It also came a mere seven months after getting spun out as a fully independent company by Dell Technologies Inc.

“For VMware, this means a dramatically different operating model, with financial performance and shareholder value creation as the dominant and perhaps sole agenda,” Vellante said.

Questions surrounding what the transition might look like were front-of-mind during VMware Explore 2023, with the event an opportunity to examine what role VMware will play in Broadcom’s future, and vice versa.

Insights during VMware Explore 2023 were provided by industry analysts Dave Vellante, John Furrier (second from right), Lisa Martin (second from left), Rob Strechay (left) and David Nicholson of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, as well as company executives and industry analysts. They unpacked the Broadcom acquisition and discussed what could come next with industry professionals. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are four key insights you may have missed:

1) The future of enterprise computing is happening now.

VMware Explore marked theCUBE’s 13th consecutive year covering VMware events. With focus being paid to the Broadcom deal — and what it could mean for the future of Tanzu — it was an opportunity to reflect on the company’s history. In particular, it meant a focus for the company on consolidating its offerings and presenting a unique opportunity for multicloud solutions, according to theCUBE analysts.

“It was three things for me,” Vellante said as part of a keynote analysis. “Broadcom, multicloud and AI. Broadcom, they’ve said what they’re going to do, and they’re going to do it. So, execute or die. That’s basically the message there. I think there’s a lot of potential in multicloud, but they’ve got a lot of work to do.”

That said, VMware is in a good position because they have a huge install base and a lot of affinity and processes and skillsets tied to the company. When it comes to AI, Vellante felt that the company had a lot of work to do.

Multicloud, of course, has played a key role at the heart of VMware’s narrative, as the company has taken a neutral position as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC assert dominance. That strategy is bearing fruit, according to Furrier.

“What’s resonating here at the show is the senior executives who run the cloud group — like the main jewels [such as vSAN], all the core products — they clearly see that as the cash cow, and are going there to support that mission,” he said.

Of course, the increasing prominence of multicloud solutions presents both opportunities and challenges. But moving forward, the company will need to focus on issues ranging from interoperability to ease of use across diverse cloud ecosystems, according to Vellante.

“They’ve got to go beyond policy management, and they’ve got to really create that true multicloud abstraction layer,” he said. “Then there’s a data lake, which is providing intelligence, which is very important to have the metrics.”

During a keynote address during the event, Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang shed some light on the future of enterprise computing, echoing theCUBE’s sentiment that “the future of enterprise computing is happening now.” That suggested that although cuts are coming, the VMware story is resonating, with multicloud and supercloud landing as the next career path for cloud architects as AI comes in, according to Furrier.

“[Huang] pointed out that VMware — and this is the real story about the transition, some say the demise of the old VMware and the rise of the new VMware — is that they changed history,” he said. “They reinvented and refactored computing with virtualization, and then they pivoted to [hyperconverged infrastructure] after hypervisors became a commodity.”

Amid this transition, a new silicon era has been emerging in enterprise computing — something that often is difficult to see while in the midst of it, according to Sarbjeet Johal, theCUBE guest analyst and founder and chief executive officer of StackPane.

“But if you zoom out and see it from the outside, the x86 platform is being challenged, mainly due to the AI developments, generative AI and more processing in the storage arrays, networking cards,” he said.

Here’s the complete kickoff keynote analysis analyst panel with Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin, Rob Strechay and John Furrier, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMware Explore 2023 event:

2) There’s a huge need to think about data and compute differently.

For more than two decades, VMware has sought to drive tech innovation while being characterized by adaptability and a commitment to community. Today, it is moving toward AI-powered solutions, according to Chief Executive Officer Raghu Raghuram.

The company has positioned itself as a solver of problems, according to Raghuram. That means understanding what engineers are geeking out about while understanding what customers are trying to do but aren’t getting done.

“You’ve got to be thinking about how do I bring the compute and the model to the data, not the other way around all the time,” he said. “That’s a multicloud problem; that is exactly how we came about it.”

The company has used AI to accelerate its strategy, while also recognizing how important GPUs, network technology, storage technology and overall system costs are in building AI infrastructure, according to Raghuram. Meanwhile, as the technology world shifts toward a more balanced multicloud ecosystem, VMware has sought to lead the way with evolving technology in enterprise computing, virtualization and multicloud solutions, according to Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware. When it comes to AI, there was a lot of excitement reinforced about what the company is bringing forward with private AI.

At the same time, the company didn’t want to tell the world that all it was doing was generative AI. It’s true that it has a role to play as part of multicloud to enable generative AI, but at the same time, it must keep pushing forward its multicloud portfolio, according to Dhawan.

“It was good to see products like NSX+, vSAN Max, Lifecycle Services, Tanzu Application Engine, things that we did to enhance the multicloud portfolio, were well-received,” he said. “I almost feel like we could have talked a little bit more about the basic value proposition of software-defined data center, because customers are still on that journey towards multicloud.”

With all of this in mind, it’s important to remember how multicloud architecture and AI integration are shaping tomorrow’s tech landscape, according to Kit Colbert, chief technology officer of VMware, as businesses seek to stay ahead in the digital race, reshaping industries and driving innovation.

“It was not part of a traditional operating system,” Colbert said. “They used to call it middleware, but now what you see is that it is kind of that infrastructure type of thing. I do think it’s interesting how the evolution of this space is really allowing us to help come in and standardize and take away some of that complexity.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Raghu Raghuram:

3) The new announcements are a signal toward VMware’s future.

This focus on generative AI and multicloud — including an expanded partnership with Nvidia, intended to allow customers to run AI services along with data so as to preserve data privacy — is representative of the next steps ahead, according to company officials.

“The killer application that is driving it is the generative AI stuff,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for cloud platform business at VMware. “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.”

Cost savings, of course, are of key importance to companies today, which is why VMware has sought to use its platform to deliver full visibility, so organizations can manage workloads across their central processing units and graphics processing units inventories, according to Chris Wolf, vice president of AI Labs at VMware.

“With the scarcity of GPUs, it’s one of the reasons people are coming to us because we can give them a platform that provides full awareness of their CPU and GPU inventory and can intelligently share those between workloads,” Wolf said. “It is key to gain access to these compute devices but then also to save money at the same time.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Krish Prasad and Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of product and technical marketing of the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware:

4) Collaboration remains key.

Through all of this, VMware’s partner ecosystem remains of key importance. Take the company’s relationship with Microsoft, with a goal to redefine business with VDI and cloud technology.

Microsoft Azure’s collaboration with Azure VMware Solution is intended to benefit customers across industries by including AVS in VMware Cloud Universal, according to Brett Tanzer, vice president of product management at Microsoft.

Microsoft and VMware have done a lot of work to “take the friction out of how you buy and what it takes to get the best cost,” Tanzer said. “It really is the VCF, the VMware Cloud Foundation product that people are using on-premises today. We’ve just taken it in conjunction with VMware, and we brought it into Azure Data Centers.”

Meanwhile, in addition to automating containerization, Dell has underpinned VxRail to deliver end-user solutions for hosting and deploying modern applications. It’s all about pairing VxRail with all the VMware technology, according to Ash McCarty, director of multicloud product management at Dell Technologies.

“How we look at it is the capabilities that VMware is exposing to our customer base,” he said. “They can then deploy those on VxRail and get all the automated infrastructure outcomes that we make available to customers and the value that they can drive into the product.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Brett Tanzer and Scott Manchester, director of product management for Azure virtual desktop and Windows 365 at Microsoft:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the VMware Explore 2023 event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

(* 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