On this episode of Six Five On The Road at VMware Explore Las Vegas, hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead are joined by Broadcom‘s President and CEO, Hock Tan, for a conversation on highlights from his keynote and impactful events from VMware Explore Las Vegas.
Their discussion covers:
- Insights on what resonated most with attendees at the packed VMware Explore session
- Feedback from customers and partners gathered during the event
- Key takeaways Hock Tan wishes for the VMware community from Explore 2024
- A reflective close from hosts Pat and Dan on the keynote insights and broader implications
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: We are live here in Las Vegas for VMware Explore 2024. President and CEO Hock Tan at Broadcom has just gotten off the stage and it’s our pleasure to have you here. How are you?
Hock Tan: Good, thank you.
Patrick Moorhead: Excellent.
Hock Tan: Very nice to see you guys.
Patrick Moorhead: It is. And we cleared the 4,500 practitioners out of here about 10 minutes ago. Thank you so much for taking this time.
Hock Tan: Happy to do so.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. We had the chance to sit down with you. We talked in detail and now that you got this kind of instant reaction, you had a packed room, everybody was sort of at the edge of their seat Hock, “What is he going to say? Is he going to come out and say anything interesting? Is he going to say that people have cloud PTSD?” Is he going to suggest that there… I mean you had a great session, you had a packed house. What was your sort of immediate, as you walked off the stage that this landed, this resonated and you were really excited about?
Hock Tan: Well, the key thing in this event, I’m amazed, and I’ve attended at least one before the close of the acquisition, but this is the first after the close of the acquisition nine, 10 months ago when we held it and we were holding it purposefully directed to the practitioners. As you mentioned, we had a great audience here, over 4,000 practitioners, system analysts, administrators who are fans of VMware. So it’s to start with, we’re in great shape, but what is more interesting is what we are telling them is essentially what they have been telling us over the past 18 months, which is they love VMware, they love the products, it works, it’s very stable, but they think it could be better. More than that, they think the components can be put together to run much better. And that’s exactly the story we delivered to them over the past one hour.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And yesterday I think was the channel event that you had with your channel partners, and I know you gave a keynote there. What type of feedback are you getting from your partners? You simplify, you’ve gone from 8,000 SKUs to 4,000, you’ve put four to more neutral channel strategy with everybody. What’s the feedback been?
Hock Tan: Well, I’ve heard positive feedback and going into the meeting, going into the call or conference with them, I think I wasn’t sure that they were understanding what we are doing because we did it in a fairly accelerated timeframe. We got feedback that, “Man, you guys were doing it really too fast” and we felt we wanted to do something, tear the band-aid off and get going. And what some of them were doing, some of them, their management, their leaders get it. Because what it meant for them, as we said, we are enhancing the ecosystem. We’re now focusing on making sure a category of partners adds the value we need in terms of our routes to market. It’s all about routes to market. It’s all about supporting the products and instead of everybody does the same thing, we start to specialize and it kind of freaked out some of them at the beginning, especially in short term.
But as they begin to understand the longer term implications for them that we are trying to create a more healthy ecosystem that could be more financially rewarding for them to succeed. I think we’re getting that message through, and the feedback from that conference, from my keynote address at the partners I think was by and large positive. Now many of them are probably taking a wait and see attitude. We should see.
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, that’s good. And these conferences are all about talking to customers, talking to channel partners, getting up on big stages like this. Anything in particular, I know it’s early, but any feedback on things like VCF 9 or private AI or advanced services?
Hock Tan: I think the practitioners, the clients, and the partners in this conference, and it’s early, we just finished it, but the initial feedback as they come up to chat about it is they like it. They love it actually, frankly, because it shows, we brought VMware under Broadcom, continue to invest. But more than continue to invest, we in many ways are doubling down in specific areas they care about.
One is to make the product, as I mentioned, even better, more user-friendly. We hear a lot about it. It’s great products resilient, but they say we should make it more user-friendly. So we did. You hear a lot of it in the conference, how we improved it. Second thing is we put it all together in this stack called VMware Cloud Foundation, VCF, and now they start to understand how it works together. They never had that chance. And that’s what this whole message, this past hour is all about. Showing them look at how we improve the product and look at how now they can work together. So you can bring private cloud on-prem.
Daniel Newman: I know you had thousands of practitioners here with you and you were really excited to speak to that community, but you also flashed a slide that talked about what CIOs are thinking and how they’re planning to invest. I think you had a data point, it was about 83% of CIOs are planning to repatriate, bring workloads back. We’ve talked about this a lot over the years that this is happening. Now you’ve got proof points. You’re hearing from these CIOs, which gives a great opportunity to those practitioners out there. Was that the big thing you wanted the audience to walk away is that this is the AWS on-prem for this group of practitioners to deliver value to these CIOs and bring workloads back and give that cloud flexibility and do it more cost-effectively in compliance? I mean, what was that one big thing?
Hock Tan: The business thesis of what’s happening, which is 8 out of 10 CIOs out there appear to considering if not already started repatriating workloads back from public cloud on-prem and that the best way to do it for the message for the CIO or CIOs are we have it. This is a great alternative to public cloud, which is VCF. We have the technology, we have the solutions, use it and we’ll help you use it. So that’s a message to CIO’s enterprise. You can build a resilient, secure environment, which was something they never had before.
But then the other message I like your question on, what about the practitioners? Well, CIOs can’t do it on their own. The practitioners who are vSphere ESX diehards, this is the opportunity to show we are the experts. We can create. We have the skills to create that private cloud, build that private cloud for those CIOs on-prem and for the partners, not only partners, for the partners, particularly resellers, but also system integrators. It’s a huge opportunity. So now the huge opportunity for them is get it deployed, get it operating. It’s a great opportunity for partners, but also our core audience, the practitioner.
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, I love it. That’s a great way to summarize this conversation here. And those were some of our takeaways. Just want to thank you for coming on here. Literally just walking off-stage, getting back on the stage. You weren’t done yet, but we are here in the big tent event. So thank you so much.
Hock Tan: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: This may be the beginning of these Six Five wrap-up editions and Hock, we love you being a first as we jump on stage immediately after the keynote, talk about all this. And of course we’ll have to have you back soon hear about this progress. We’re having a little fun up here, aren’t we?
Hock Tan: This is great. I mean the energy is still buzzing.
Patrick Moorhead: Yes, I know, totally.
Daniel Newman: I love it. And thank you all for joining us here on The Six Five. We had many conversations beforehand, during and beyond here on this network. Follow us, join us. We have Hock Tan, we had Chris Wolf who was also on the stage, and Paul Turner. For more extended conversation and all the coverage here on The Six Five. But for now, we got to go. Thanks for joining us. See you soon.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
