On this episode of Six Five On The Road at VMware Explore Las Vegas, hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead are joined by VMware‘s Paul Turner, Vice President Products, VMware Cloud Foundation Division for a conversation on the future of VMware Cloud Foundation and its implications for cloud computing. With insights into how Broadcom‘s recent activities align with VMware’s vision, this deep dive explores the evolving landscape of cloud infrastructure and services.
Their discussion covers:
- The strategic vision and roadmap for VMware Cloud Foundation
- How Broadcom’s acquisition impacts VMware Cloud Foundation’s strategy
- Innovations in cloud infrastructure and services planned by VMware
- The role of VMware Cloud Foundation in facilitating hybrid cloud environments
- Future trends in cloud technology and VMware’s position within it
Learn more at Broadcom and VMware.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road here in Las Vegas at VMware Explore 2024. Dan, we’ve been having some great conversations. Private cloud, private AI. This cloud conversation has been a great one going on 15 years.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s a teenager now, Pat.
Patrick Moorhead: It is.
Daniel Newman: And I think depending on the exact first workloads that we consider, it’s somewhere between 15, almost nearing 20, it can’t drink, but soon it’ll be able to vote and it is moving really, really quickly. And yes, we are seeing the conversation ebb quickly in the direction of private as we are helping companies figure how to make that data work and how to do it in a way that’s scalable and cost controlled. And then of course, AI has only made all of this stuff way more important for ITDMs, CIOs, and of course companies that are trying to technically move, but also do it really intelligently.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I’m always struck, the 15-year-old cranky teenager called the cloud has been going on for so long, yet about 80% of the data is still on-prem. There’s a lot of reasons for that. And the public cloud has seen just immense popularity because it was the easy button initially for developers and there was a lot of tops down. But what happened is people are standing back, it’s like, gosh, I’m spending a lot on this, and there are on-prem stacks, we’re going to get to VCF that are enabling that experience on-prem. And I can’t think of a better person to have this conversation than Paul Turner. Welcome to The Six Five.
Paul Turner: Hey, thank you so much and glad to be here.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it is. And Paul, you heard our preamble, Pat. Of course, you can’t forget, a lot of the original operating model behind cloud was CapEx and OpEx. It was just about how to consume and how to make it very, very digestible and easy. And so now it’s access to the instances and computers, access to the storage and network, access to the advanced services that are required and new questions are arising.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Daniel Newman: Is it important if it’s the public cloud or if it’s just an IT stack, by the way, that looks and feels and operates like a cloud, but it’s on your prem? I mean, and so we’re there, but it’s been a big year, Paul, and you’ve been out and about on the road with your customers. You’re leading on this VCF effort here. What are your customers saying? I guess Pat and I are rambling about it, but what are your customers telling you?
Paul Turner: Well, I actually love the description that you gave of cloud being the cranky teenager, but teenagers get expensive, as we all know as well. And I think what we have seen over the last few years is we’ve been doing TCO analysis for customers in terms of how can they implement on the cloud, a native public cloud versus on-prem. And we find that it’s 40% cheaper for customers to implement in their data center once they’ve got a level of scale, right? It’s a much, much more efficient environment. But cloud also taught us something. Cloud taught us about agility and agility matters and its application agility and deployment. What you also see inside in customers is many of them have virtualized their data center. And they virtualized, well virtualized, at least their compute platform. They get great efficiency off it. They’re doing that mostly with VMware, but they’ve got independent pillars and stacks of product, silos of product that really they haven’t integrated into a cloud platform. And that’s the second thing that we’re seeing is best-in-class people who’ve actually deployed full cloud platform are getting immense benefits from that platform, 61% faster deployment. And that’s the stat from IDC, the latest report that we actually saw from IDC and 34% lower infrastructure costs.
Even those customers out there that have virtualized, too many of them haven’t actually moved to really virtualizing their full data center and doing a cloud platform for their data center because doing that will lower their infrastructure costs and will actually increase their agility. Those are the two big factors. The third factor that is very conscious in most IT organizations is security, confidence in compliance of your environment, protection from ransomware threats. Those are the three trends. Cloud is not cheaper, security is paramount, and how do we make it much more operationally efficient for existing customers to actually run a full private cloud because many of them haven’t done that and doing it will have great savings.
Patrick Moorhead: VCF or VMware Cloud Foundation, essentially you’ve worked many years to bring the benefits of the public cloud on-prem. Dan and I got pre-briefed as analysts on VCF9, big announcement today at the show, VCF9. But for those who may not have heard about it, maybe the people tuning into this video right now, what are some of the highlights of that?
Paul Turner: Yeah, actually really great to get it out today, right? We’ve got this launch. It was a very exciting day-
Patrick Moorhead: Getting it out, is it GA? Is it the announcement? Is it-
Paul Turner: It’s the announcement. We’re still finishing the development work. It’s still in progress in terms of development, but it’s a full platform for your cloud environment. It breaks down those silos that you have inside your infrastructure. If you’re independently managing your compute, your storage, your networking, just think about those common IaaS stack components. You can’t deliver on the agility that you want from a private cloud, right? You can’t deliver the speed of application delivery and deployment because to do that, everything has to be software-defined. You really have to do it. VCF9 is the next generation of our VCF product.
We’ve a version 5.2 out there at the moment, but this is where we have made changes. We integrated all of our teams. We had silos of networking, compute, storage. We brought them together, we’ve integrated those teams, gives you a single operations platform for root cause analysis and diagnostics for administrators to be able to find out what’s going wrong in the platform, whether it’s storage, networking, compute. If you can’t find the issue there automatically, Skyline is integrated into it. Skyline is doing root cause analysis based on commonly found issues, and then you can do auto logging. It’ll automatically correlate and collect any necessary logs so we can find your issue faster if it is a fix that we need to provide. From an admin point of view, fleet management built into it for administrators, manage large-scale environments and be able to do it through single automated API surface or through interfaces and UI interfaces. A lot in there to make the life of the virtual infrastructure administrator who’s now going to manage the entire data center to make them a cloud administrator for that entire cloud. And the second big piece to it is of course applications because we care about how do we deliver applications to you faster.
And we’re not just talking about any applications. We’re talking about you can have your traditional VM-based applications. We’ve got full native Kubernetes applications built into it. And that Kubernetes has a built-in load balancer, a monitoring service, a backup, a registry service, all of the services you need to actually run containerized applications that you may want to run. VM-based applications, private AI-based applications, all available through a very easy-to-consume effectively marketplace service that you have available for customers. Two big things that we focus on. Third area is, again, I mentioned security. That’s a third area that we look at in terms of how do we build this as the most confidential, trusted compute platform you can run on.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Daniel Newman: And beyond what’s baked right in, and of course part of the whole narrative is about these advanced services, Paul. Doing more than what can you build on top with VCF. And in your general session, by the way, nice job.
Paul Turner: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: Appreciate that. You talked about this robust set of offerings, advanced services. Talk a little bit about what they are and how they work with VCF and the benefit they’re going to provide to customers.
Paul Turner: Think about VCF. You’ve got your base platform in there. It provides you a full automated runtime. Your admins are all happy. They can scale their operations much more.
Patrick Moorhead: Are admins ever happy?
Paul Turner: No, they’ll be super happy with this because they’ll be able to do just much more. And the problem they struggle with is they don’t have enough people to run the infrastructure and it costs, and they’re being told to do more with less. Well, you can do more with less with VCF9. And that’s the key thing is fleet management. But let’s get back to the advanced services that you mentioned. You got a base platform, there’s a lot of value-add pieces that you can actually deliver to customers that are super beneficial. I’ll just touch on a few of them. You can take our private AI, how can you go anywhere at the moment without thinking generative AI solutions? How can I bring them into my data center, bring them into my IT because my data is trusted, secure, private data that I want to manage, so why can’t I bring analytics to that? That’s one of our add-on services, advanced services area.
And we’ve enhanced it with an updated model store, GPU reservations tied into it, the NIM blueprints that are there from NVIDIA. All of that, like a better platform. But we’ve got a disaster recovery add-on service that does full ransomware protection and recovery, that even if you got infected, you can actually get and roll back to actually a secure and safe state advanced security built into it so that you can look at network monitoring and services so that you look for any escapes inside in your network ’cause that’s where usually the attacks come from for ransomware is they do side channel attacks.
But if you protect your network, you’ve done that really well. Advanced services, we’ve data services. I’m not sure if people are aware, but we’ve data services that include MySQL, RabbitMQ, Postgres, Valkey, which is basically a key value store all available in our data services. And I can go on, we’ve got our Tanzu developer services. All of these are extended catalog services that actually make you build a better cloud and it’s a better cloud, bringing extra protection into the cloud, bringing extra load balancing and application level load balancing that you may need into the cloud. Bringing that extended set of services, it’s not a full PaaS layer.
Daniel Newman: Right.
Paul Turner: But what it enables is customers to build their own PaaS layer and services. It’s the next layer of services beyond a base IaaS stack that completes the offering. On top of that, you can as an IT org decide to deploy whatever application services you want. And we give you the flexibility to build those applications, build those blueprints, deploy them. It’s easy.
Patrick Moorhead: As analysts, I really appreciate you calling out the IaaS and we’re getting close to PaaS services.
Paul Turner: Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: And customers can create their own, because that’s the way us analysts think. We always have to put something in a stovepipe.
Paul Turner: Yes.
Patrick Moorhead: Unlike enterprise SaaS, you can’t just pull a trigger and everything just rolls over on day one. What should customers be doing today to get prepared for VCF9? And maybe if you can talk about maybe the type of customer, hey, they’re here and to get ready for VCF9, they should do these things.
Paul Turner: Yeah, well, I think to start with, we’ve made it already quite easy for them. VCF 5.2 is the release we actually just did in July.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Paul Turner: It’s fully upgradable to VCF9. Not going to be difficult at all for customers. Very easy.
Patrick Moorhead: This is as easy as enterprise SaaS.
Paul Turner: This is as easy as-
Patrick Moorhead: Okay, okay. I need to eat my words there.
Paul Turner: But I think more importantly, that means, and we brought in one key feature I think that I’d like to emphasize in VCF 5.2. We brought in what we call brownfield, which sounds terrible, but basically it’s import of existing environments. Existing vSphere, vSAN environments can actually just be directly imported. And now suddenly you’ve got all the fleet management of VCF and fully upgradable to version nine. I would say don’t worry too much. You can actually deploy today and upgrade today. But the other thing is that you’ve got to look at these silos of IT that you have in many enterprises. You may not have done your operations as perfectly as you would’ve liked. There’s probably optimization you can do on capacity planning and forecasting. For that, we really recommend that people do what we call cloud maturity assessment. And in fact, at the show this week, we’re actually doing cloud maturity assessments for customers.
Patrick Moorhead: Okay.
Paul Turner: They’re one hour where you get a full assessment report, it’s individualized, and it gives you that first indicator of, am I best practice in that area or this area? It’s seven category areas. And I think it’s a very good starting point for a customer to just get that outside in view of how I’m doing. And then look at, hey, which is the area that would be best for me to optimize with the highest return, the highest ROI for me, and go after that, right?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Paul Turner: Do that outside in assessment of your environment. Too many people have looked at their private cloud environment and let it sit and not innovate within that platform. And I think the cost benefit means you got to flip that on its head. You have to start innovating back on that private cloud again because the ROI is there.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, and what you’re saying, Paul, really jives well with the conversations we’ve had with Hock Tan where he’s really focusing on the fact that maybe private can lead public and not public lead private. I mean, that is still where the majority of workloads lie. And you and I talk about that all the time. But having said that, the trend line, the cranky teenager has been at the forefront of what most enterprise IT teams have been thinking, build around cloud, and then of course hybridize. The whole theme of this event is maybe it’s time to think about this differently.
Paul Turner: Flip it on its head, but with a little bit of a twist. And a little bit of a twist is that you can deploy. This is a private cloud platform that you can deploy into your data center, into hyperscaler data centers. You can run it up on Google, AWS, on Azure, on Oracle.
Daniel Newman: Right.
Paul Turner: You can run it on our service providers. Our CSPs, we’ve more than 500 CSPs in our program. You’ve got deployment choice. What you have is a common platform, common attributes. You’ve got easy migration services where you move applications without change. Like overnight I can decide, hey, I just want to move it from this service to that service. That’s a big difference. Private cloud is a platform and a software platform, and it gives you the agility and performance and management capability that you need. But deploying it, you can deploy it anywhere, which is pretty powerful.
Daniel Newman: And there it is. That’s the big moment, the big aha for everybody here at VMware Explore 2024. Paul Turner, thanks so much for joining us.
Paul Turner: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: Thanks. And thank you so much for being part of The Six Five. We are here on the road at VMware Explore 2024 in Las Vegas. Pat, we covered a lot of ground and we will cover a lot more. We hope you’ll subscribe, stay tuned, be part of our community for all the analysis that Pat and I bring here on the show. And of course all of our talent here on The Six Five, but we got to go. We’ll see you all soon. Bye-bye.
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.
