Broadcom Inc. announced new capabilities for its VMware Cloud Foundation or VCF private cloud platform at this week’s VMware Explore 2024 in Barcelona, focusing on the company’s focus on the growing adoption of artificial intelligence, national digital sovereignty and cyber resilience.

These factors have also been causing companies to reevaluate their cloud strategies. Many chief information officers have told me they have been looking to augment their broader cloud strategies with more use of private cloud and, in some cases, bringing workloads back from an “as a service” model to a private model, which offers more control.

The company also introduced ecosystem partnerships and modernization programs designed to accelerate the development of generative AI apps, cybersecurity initiatives and sovereign cloud adoption.

It’s important to understand the nuances of VCF. Although it’s called “private cloud,” it does not mean on-premises only, as customers can deploy the private cloud in their own data center, at the edge or in a public cloud. Krish Prasad (pictured), Broadcom senior vice president and general manager of the VCF Division, summed this up when he stated the company is “enabling private cloud everywhere” with VCF. He then mentioned the new capabilities when he said Broadcom is “unlocking the promise of AI in the enterprise, delivering new levels of organizational resilience, and supporting the privacy and digital sovereignty demands” of global customers.

In the analyst briefing last week, Mark Chuang, senior director for Broadcom’s VCF division, said the company is “rolling out continuous innovation in areas that are top of mind for customers,” especially AI and cyber resiliency.

Chuang added that Broadcom is building out its private cloud platform to offer customers new ways to obtain resiliency and choice. He said the goal is to help customers “achieve faster time to value” in three ways:

• Gaining an accurate understanding of their current situation
• Accelerating deployment
• Ensuring information technology teams have the necessary training to execute

Fast ROI for customers

“Based on data gathered from deployed VCF customers, we see a 10-month payback period on their investment, up to 34% lower infrastructure costs and 61% faster deployment time for new workloads,” Chuang said. “And when it comes to resolving data loss incidences, we’re seeing reports of 66% faster recovery and resolution.”

Technology and vision are essential, but the actual value of any solution is how well it delivers customer results. One Broadcom VCF customer seeing solid results from its deployments is ABN AMRO. The third-largest Dutch bank faced rapidly changing customer expectations. Chuang said customers want more value-based services from their banks.

“This means a shift away from just standard checking and savings accounts to more personalized self-service banking experiences and support, he said. “The bank felt tied down by the complexity of its legacy technology environment. Following extensive analysis, ABN AMRO decided to build a private cloud platform based on VCF and move away from their previous managed service.”

“ABN AMRO wanted to gain greater control over its environment, breaking free of the constraints of its existing, costly, rigid agreement, getting robust management capabilities, and ultimately being free to run apps anywhere without the complexity of an application rewrite,” Chuang explained. “The impact they’ve seen is developers are enjoying the benefits of an automated service catalog and improved test tooling in sandboxes. Ultimately, the bank is taking back ownership of its technology. It’s now in a much stronger position to deliver better services to their customers at speed.”

VMware is able to achieve these results by delivering VCF as a turnkey, validated solution. This is a playbook the company has used many times before, dating back to the “VCE” joint solution with Cisco Systems Inc. and EMC Corp. When a customer is required to assemble a complex solution, there is always weeks or even months of tweaking and tuning time. The validated design removes much of the guesswork.

VMware Tanzu Data Services for VCF

Broadcom also announced a new advanced service — VMware Tanzu Data Services — “to streamline deployment, management and consumption of critical data services and enable faster application delivery, better data security and governance, and operational efficiency.” The company said the data services offer “a modern way to store, manage and process data,” which addresses the challenges faced when deploying microservices, serverless and other modern application architectures at scale.

Enhancements to cyber resilience, security and recovery

The company is also introducing VMware Live Recovery, which will support Google Cloud VMware Engine as an isolated recovery environment for VCF workloads for cyber and disaster recovery. This extends Live Recovery’s protection of GCVE sites as a source while enabling a “consistent, secure and simplified” experience for protecting VMware workloads running on-premises or in the cloud to GCVE.

Expanding the reach of gen AI services with VMware Private AI

With generative AI fast becoming a business necessity, Broadcom is extending its Private AI strategy to support Microsoft’s Azure AI Video Indexer on VMware Private AI running on VCF and Azure VMware Solution. This is another example of Broadcom’s commitment to helping customers accelerate their time-to-value for AI projects on VCF while enabling the Azure AI Video Indexer to run anywhere regardless of cloud deployment model.

Continuing private cloud modernization

Broadcom also announced additional investments in its Private Cloud Modernization Program, which helps customers navigate the journey to private cloud with VCF. The company introduced two new capabilities:

• VMware Cloud Foundation Architect Certification is designed for individuals who can “conceptualize and design VCF solutions that fulfill both business and technical requirements.” In addition to validating an architect’s skill for designing systems that include key features such as availability, manageability, performance, recoverability and security, it also highlights the importance of capacity planning, disaster recovery, and scalability.
• Private Cloud Maturity and Optimization Tool for Partners empowers partners to help their customers realize the many benefits of private cloud as they move forward with private clouds. Partners now have access to the Private Cloud Framework, an assessment leading to a Private Cloud Maturity Index Score for their customers, and prescriptive guidance from Broadcom. The company says that by leveraging the model, partners can “accelerate customers’ outcomes, deliver strategic account plans faster and develop and deliver new services.”

Partners support national digital sovereignty

Broadcom announced that 50 VMware Cloud Service Providers now offer sovereign cloud services based on VCF, including 30 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Sovereign VCSP partners meet Broadcom’s requirements for location operations by a legal entity that “owns, operates and manages the sovereign cloud offering with complete jurisdictional control, local data residency and portability without lock-in.”

VCF includes specific capabilities that address sovereign cloud requirements, ranging from privacy-enhancing computation support with Intel and AMD chipsets (confidential computing); integrated data-at-rest protection with vSAN Encryption; Secure Boot for ESXi Hosts and vSphere virtual machine encryption; comprehensive data services and compliance monitoring, alerting and reporting with VCF Operations.

Broadcom said VCSP sovereign clouds also support Bring Your Own Keys, which provides customers with “even more confidence that no one else, not even the CSP, can view or access their information without permission.”

Why it all matters

That’s a lot of news from Broadcom and its VMware unit on several key fronts. But in the fast-moving worlds of AI, cloud services and security, the companies that succeed will be the first movers that offer the broadest, most valuable products and services.

Broadcom has been selective regarding the parts of the VMware business it supports and invests in. Private cloud is an area that Broadcom appears to be “all in” on, as it favors a broad platform approach. AI will continue to drive customers to private clouds, and we are in the very early stages of this wave. VMware customers should expect to see continued investment in this area from Broadcom.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: SiliconANGLE