Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud, APJ | The Golden Path to Private Cloud

More from Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud, APJ

William Lam

Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect

Broadcom

Patrick N. Webb

Delivery Director, Virtualization/HCI/EUC

AHEAD

play_circle_outline Overcoming organizational silos: A guide for customers to start building a private cloud successfully

play_circle_outline Collaboration between different IT teams crucial for successful private cloud deployment.

play_circle_outline Automation as a key driver for efficiency and reducing operational complexity.

play_circle_outline AI and modernization driving demand for optimized private cloud infrastructures.

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The Golden Path to Private Cloud

William Lam

Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect Broadcom

Patrick N. Webb

Delivery Director, Virtualization/HCI/EUC AHEAD

William Lam, distinguished platform engineering architect, VMware Cloud Foundation, at Broadcom Inc., and Patrick Webb, delivery director, virtualization /HCI/EUC at Ahead Technology Inc, join theCUBE’s John Furrier at the “Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud” event to explore how organizations can modernize infrastructure using VMware Cloud Foundation 9. Their discussion focuses on building private clouds that are aligned with real-world IT demands and business outcomes.

Lam and Webb share insights on overcoming roadblocks like IT silos, tech... Read more

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What are the main challenges customers face when transitioning to a modern private cloud? add

What challenges do organizations face when dealing with siloed teams and security involvement in their processes? add

What are the core services and features of the VCF stack that enhance migration processes and provide a cloud-like experience? add

What are the current trends and perspectives regarding private cloud and platform engineering within the context of Broadcom VMware's ecosystem? add

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The Golden Path to Private Cloud

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>> Welcome everyone to theCUBE, special presentation here in our Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with Broadcom VMware, delivering the modern private cloud with the launch of VCF 9. Big announcement. The golden path to the modern private cloud using cloud maturity frameworks is the topic. William Lam distinguished platform engineer, architect at Broadcom, and Patrick Webb delivery director of virtualization at AHEAD. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

William Lam

>> Yeah, first time here. A long-time listener actually.

Patrick N. Webb

>> Yeah, thanks for having me.

>> Yeah, love 16 years covering VMware, VMware Explore, VMworld, the old days, just seeing the virtualization wave all here. William, both you and Patrick work every single day with customers to get this modern footprint. We've seen that journey, the simplification. Now we got VCF 9. Customers want to get to that modern private cloud. How do they do that? How do they get there?

William Lam

>> Yeah, no, great question, John. And you're right, it is a journey. Organizations really need to understand, have a clear path on what that North Star looks like. And what we see is that the industry has changed quite a bit in terms of the technology landscape. We've got AI, we've have different types of application stacks that's come on board, and many IT organizations just haven't been able to keep pace with this change. And part of this goes back to something much more fundamental, which is a keyword change. And it's human nature to do things that's quite familiar, but oftentimes it doesn't always mean it's the most optimal. And part of that is really speaking with customers and even some of our partners is really help them understand what does really good look like and build out their Nirvana state and then start to work backwards and say, how are these business outcomes, how do that tie back to IT infrastructure deliverable outcomes to really enable the business.

>> Patrick, let's go to you on this because obviously delivery, virtualization is the underpinning. Everyone's got so much on their plate these days. You got mandates to take that Gen AI hill. I need more data. Platform engineer, things are taking names and kicking butt on the platform side. So now you got the modern era's here. What's holding customers back from getting to that modern private cloud?

Patrick N. Webb

>> I'd say there's two prominent blockers that we see a lot with our customers, and one is just a lot of customers just don't know where to start when building a private cloud. And secondly, we see a lot of really siloed organizations. So we'll talk about where to get started. Building a private cloud obviously is a very complex undertaking. A lot of thought and planning goes into it, and a lot of clients just need help with that first step, like how to get out of the starting block. So we get a lot of times a lot of our customers super geeked out about the technology stack. Everybody's excited about VCF 9 and what that brings, the features, the functionality, but there's a lot of important considerations to take into account as well. And what we try to do with our customers is help build that holistic cloud maturity roadmap. So understanding where clients are at now, their current architecture, the pain points they have in their environment, the technical debt, the skill sets they have as William talked about with the people and processes. But also not only understanding where they're at now, where they need to be, and so driving and determining what those business outcomes are. Things we see day to day are a speed to delivering applications. So VCF automation, perfect fit for that. Everybody needs to reduce costs. So we see a lot of right-sizing with VCF operations, but ultimately really focused on understanding where they need to be for those things that measurably impact the business. So after we understand where they're at, what their future goals are. We really like to help our customers understand the full VCF platform. There's a lot of components there. And a lot of times there's confusion, there's misconceptions about those components, and so we like to remove that for our customers, help enable them and explain that to them and really help them understand the art of the possible and how it fits within their environment. We have a proven methodology where we evaluate, like I said, understand current state, future state, map those gaps. And that not only gives us those first tactical steps to get our customers out of the starting blocks but really gives that tangible and trackable roadmap so we can ensure they're making incremental progress. So I'd say that's how we knock down the first blocker. The second one is just those siloed organizations, and unfortunately, we see this in our customers day-to-day. As William mentioned, there's so many teams, network storage, database teams. Every time you have to get security involved, it feels like a lot of a delay almost immediately. But the teams are overwhelmed. We're introducing a lot of complex designs, a lot of new dependencies. And so really as a neutral third party, AHEAD has the advantage of coming in because we see clients of every size across every industry, across every vertical. And I think just across our teams, we've seen almost every architecture, every issue you could imagine. So we're able to provide a lot of insight, a lot of perspective, and really focus on bringing creative solutions across the stack. So that's where we help broker those collaborative communications and collaborative conversations based on full stack solutions really to overcome those organizational dynamics. So I'd say it's super critical to work with VMware or a trusted partner that's willing to invest in your success, help you assess the environment, assess your business, and build that roadmap to help break down those silos. It really helps get our customers out of the gate and start making progress.

>> So Patrick, the holistic approach, get the big feel for how the maturity model is going to map out. Get started, here's a playbook. And then the siloed organizations. I mean, what are some of those departments? I mean you name a few of them, let's obviously... DevOps, containers, what are some of those siloed areas? Obviously, the virtualization team is involved with obviously storage. What else is involved?

Patrick N. Webb

>> Sure. Yeah, but a lot of time, I mean, we see those database teams and you have a lot of times Oracle teams, SQL teams, so even the database team, the operational team, and what services they need to deliver on their responsibilities. Container teams, you have native cloud teams, and how that's going to work within a hybrid cloud solution. So there's just so many teams, so many different directives. And like I mentioned somewhat jokingly security, but it's a wildly important part of the ecosystem at this point. But there's a lot of compliance and a lot of regulations around that that frankly provide roadblocks to completing some of these projects and to getting some of them out of the gate. So very important part of the solution, but it also provides some hairy roadblocks to get around in a lot of cases.

>> Yeah, those silos, you break them down, you get the integration going. The trend is towards integration, simplicity, cohesiveness amongst the groups. William, can you talk about... On your side, okay, taking customers through the journey. You heard Patrick. Okay, a lot going on, but it's... The chaos is being reined in. Take us through your side. How does the customers go through this journey? What are you guys doing?

William Lam

>> And everything Patrick say is what we're hearing from not only our customers but also our partners. And this is really where we develop the cloud maturity model for the private cloud is to really help customers understand where they're at today. And it's really important to really come in and helping our customers to be that neutral third party like Patrick mentioned. It can be very challenging conversation within an IT organization to say, hey, we might not be operating at the most optimal path forward and to be more critical of yourselves. And so that's really where VMware by Broadcom or even some of our partners can come in and provide this assessment. So the overall framework starts off with understanding what is the business initiative and what are those outcomes. As I said earlier, the technology landscape has changed quite significantly. What was the priority just a couple of years back I'm sure has changed for many IT organization, especially with this whole agentic web that's approaching us. And so the first piece of it is understanding what are the core use cases, take those business initiatives, and actually map them down to IT deliverables. Second, what we do is then we take a look at the assessment of helping our customers understand where they're at today. And this is actually quite interesting because we have a way of systematically helping our customers understand where they're at today, not just on the technology side, which I would say is probably the simple part of it, it's also the people and the processes. We see these different silo organizations and we start to see these friction points that gets created not because they want to, but it's just how they have been operating for the past decade or longer. And until the organization actually agree that this is where they're at from a starting point. Do I convey SLAs to my different lines of businesses? What is actually the levels of availability? You'd be surprised when we ask these questions to IT practitioners within the organization versus the different lines of businesses. They tend to have completely different answers. And it's all relative perspective. And so part of this goes back to what Patrick was saying is that you just have these organizations set up in a way that was really to deliver on an outcome that's a decades old. And really we need to have more of a platform mindset. So part of the assessment is helping you understand where are you at today, get the organization to align on that goal first because it's hard to really get to that future Nirvana state if we don't agree that this is a starting point. So that's a key part of the overall framework. Then we're able to help the organization figure out where do they want to be at. And not every organization needs to have a particular maturity. Not every organization is going to be doing AI, et cetera. Part of that could just be speed of delivery and optimal way of deploying workloads. We see a lot of customers still deploying workloads using spreadsheets, talking to team by team, and there's a lot of technology that really allows us to codify these processes so that it becomes more automated. And so part of that, taking the use cases, the business outcomes, tying that together with the assessment, we're then able to provide actionable recommendations. And these outcomes can span learning and education. Oftentimes we see that there are skill gaps. Not that users don't want to up-level themselves, but they're dealing with a lot of tactical outcomes. And here this is an opportunity for them to identify that within the organization. And again, coming out from a neutral party, coming in and saying, hey, this is what we're seeing, these are the opportunities ahead of them. And they can decide what is priority that's going to really impact the business. The next part of it is really then saying, what are the different resources that are available to you. Obviously, customers can go down this path themselves, but obviously, there are some challenges there. And I think this is where VMware Professional Services can come in and help accelerate that outcome. But more importantly, we're also taking these recommendations and some of these outcomes and enabling our partner ecosystem. Because we have a lot of partners like AHEAD who are well trusted by our organizations, and customers really want to lean into that and be able to get specific outcomes. And so we want to enable our third-party partners as well to be able to take advantage of the cloud maturity model and some of those recommendations and apply specific services that are available and applicable for them.

>> Patrick, I'm sure you've got a similar onboarding customer process. Take us through that. What's on your end? You got to get them started, get action going. We're hearing outcomes or you can work backwards, take us through your process.

Patrick N. Webb

>> Yeah. I mean, we've got a lot of services. I mean, we do have a very similar process and working closely with Broadcom on our partnership there, using the PCMO tool to build a holistic roadmap. But really our goal ahead is to accelerate the impact, and in this case, realizing the value of the VCF platform. And our delivery service is really where the rubber meets the road there. So if we look at services we provide around the VCF platform, it's a lot of the core services you would expect, a lot of advanced design and deployment of full stack, vSAN, NSX, operations logs. But I really consider all of that table stakes at this point. A lot of partners are going to bring that. And I think where we provide a lot of value and help our customers realize the value of the platform is those advanced services. So when we look at things like custom dashboarding and custom metrics and VCF operations, so not only providing detailed reporting but visibility tailored to our customer-specific organization and even further tailored to specific persona in the organization. Executive dashboards or administrative dashboards, so ensuring the right people have the exact data they need to run the infrastructure. We have a lot of services around NSX and deep network integration. It's just a core part of a holistic architecture within the VCF platform. Even native cloud integration, third-party security providers that we're integrating, so again, a really critical component there. And one thing that gets missed a lot I would say is migration services. So not only do we have the ability to execute on those large-scale migrations, but we also provide some advisory-led app dependency mapping, really helping customers understand their applications, how they're dependent on each other, what those traffic flows are like so that we can put together migration wave planning and do some really cool things with layer two network extensions with NSX and HCX. They really help us keep IP addresses the same through migrations to really reduce the downtime for those workloads and really speed up those migrations. And then I would say the last part for the VCF stack that we have serviced around is automation. So this is the core component that drives standardization, efficiencies, and really maximizes the value of the VCF platform. So this is where we are able to tangibly deliver that cloud-like experience that all the application, development teams, the consumers of the infrastructure, this is what they're used to from a native cloud platform. So we can tangibly deliver that cloud-like experience with VCF. And not only just VCF operations, or automation, but we also have the ability to drive a lot of extensibility through that. So integrating with things like IPAM for IP address management, Active Directory DNS, even application configuration management and desired state tools like Paraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, things like that to really drive even more value and deep integration so the customers really receive a lot of value and can really fast-forward their development cycles to market. So those are some of the core, and I would say advanced services we have around the VCF suite to help drive adoption of that. But as a full-service partner, AHEAD has a lot of services outside of that as well. So as part of our holistic approach... You already mentioned AI is on everybody's mind. So we have a full AI practice that's not only focused on AI infrastructure and GPUs, but we also have data scientists that are building the language learning models and probably more importantly, help curating the data that goes in so that there's impactful business insights coming out of their AI and ML environments. Huge focus on cyber resiliency is nobody's surprise. We do a lot of incident response environments and so heavily focused on prevention and recovery as a wrapper around all of our services and all the environments we deliver. And then I would really say AHEAD's doing a lot of really cool things in terms of financial consulting and tool rationalization. We've got a whole practice around intelligent operations. And so this is not only operations from an infrastructure perspective with VCF ops, but a lot of application monitoring and observability for the whole stack. And then for AHEAD, we really wrap that up in our managed service offering. So to provide the day two operations, the life cycle management to really help take that burden off customers and realizing the full value of the stack.

>> Patrick, you guys got a lot of stuff there. You mentioned the full-service provider, which is awesome. Business must be good right now. Obviously, the AI thing really is important to call out. I know it's not part of the VCF. It is downstream, it's a couple of dots to connect. I mean, all the work being done in private cloud right now is growing into enabling the operational sanity and comfort levels in the AI world. I mean, that's pre-agentic. There's agents out there now, we've been covering it as you know. If you don't get the platform right, you're pretty much going to be dead in the water.

Patrick N. Webb

>> Yeah. And that's where our customers need a lot of help. It's so new. And as we've been running some of those projects, there's just so many open-source tools. So many new tools that a lot of our customers just aren't familiar with. Again, you have to have the platform right, you have to have that solid rock to build your AI infrastructure on. And again, that's where we can help because when you look at the surround of an AI environment, it is so big, and frankly, it's so different. The network architecture is different, the compute architecture is different, the resiliency requirements are even different. So it's been very interesting getting involved in some of those projects, but I couldn't agree more. You have to have that platform. And so again, I think that's where VCF can shine there.

>> Yeah, William and Patrick, Paul Nashawaty on our analyst team, we've been covering AppDev. We think we're more bullish on AppDev in Broadcom VMware's ecosystem because of platform engineering and with the tie-in to open source. Huge point there. We can come back and unpack that later after this is over. But private cloud really is really setting the table. It's definitely more advanced with VCF 9, William. The basic data center, virtualization is now growing up next level. Two next levels if we think about it. Where are customers at from a private cloud standpoint? This is a modernization growth play. Do they have the skills? Where do they stand from the skill standpoint? I think it's a toss-up. Dealer's choice, William, Patrick, both can address it.

William Lam

>> It starts to enable our customers really deliver on that promise of a modern private cloud. It's not just building a better data center, but it's really building a modern private cloud that is just like the public cloud, however, you have the controls and securities of expected of an enterprise. And I think what we've seen in the past decade of virtualizing the data center, building on this compute, storage, and networking management, we now have a true foundational platform that not only allows our users, our practitioners to really start to up-level themselves and really get out of the weeds of focusing on individual workloads and really start to think about these net new workload, these modern workloads we've talked about, whether they're AI workload or just modern ways of delivering IT services. We see that using declared or state infrastructure. Patrick talked a little about Terraform and Ansible. And automation is a big opportunity for these users to really start to take a look at what they can start to automate and really start to look at what are some of the bigger business opportunities in front of them and really start to move at the speed of the business, which was something that hasn't been possible in the past just based on how organizations have been structured. And I think this is huge opportunity to really up-level these practitioners and really get the benefit of the modern private cloud.

>> Patrick, I want you to weigh in here. VCF, VCF rollout, deployment of advanced services. VCF ops is a hot category. What's your point of view on the skill standpoint? You probably see it every day.

Patrick N. Webb

>> Yeah. I mean, it's one of the places we're really driving a lot of value in our customer because from an observability perspective, there's just a vast lack of observability and visibility for our clients. So that's one of the things that we've been focusing a lot on. I mentioned it earlier with some custom dashboarding and custom super metrics. VCF ops has a lot of dashboards that are out of the box, but a lot of customers we see have very specific requests and very specific data and metrics that they want to see that are calculated for them. We spend a lot of time tailoring those solutions to meet their goals because they're very specific. I will tell you, the more and more we do, the more and more that our customers see the art of the possible, the more and more they ask for, and the more and more things they want.

>> Great stuff, guys. You shared a lot here in the segment. Appreciate it. Helping customers get on their way to the modern private cloud. Huge modernization era going on. AI is ushering in. It's a forcing function. Anything you guys would like to leave with the viewers and the listeners as we close out this segment?

William Lam

>> Yeah. We talked a little bit earlier around the people and process. While that can be definitely challenging to change within an organization, and that does take time. One thing that I'm personally excited for as an architect as well as a practitioner, is really what VCF 9 brings to the table. We now have a simple way to deploy the full stack solution fully integrated, and it really is the industry standard first private cloud solution that's really available. And so super excited for our architects, our practitioners, to really get hands-on with VCF 9.0.

>> Patrick, close us out. Give us the last word.

Patrick N. Webb

>> Yeah, John. Again, I would say... Not to make a big commercial for AHEAD and for partners, but there's just a ton of value in the VCF platform and not just those point solutions. But a lot of times our customers just simply don't know what they don't know about the platform, about the solutions, and that's where AHEAD and other partners can come in and help. We act as an extension of your teams. We can come in and offer those assessment, the planning, the holistic roadmap, implementation, integration across the board, and ultimately we want to drive you to help realize the full value of the VCF stack and the full platform. So again, a lot of partners like us, a lot of deep expertise. We have technical certifications very deeply across the entire VCF stack. AHEAD was actually just named proudly VMware's 2025 Global Partner of the Year and VCF Partner of the Year. So I'm incredibly proud of my team for that. But AHEAD's charter since our inception was to bring private cloud and hybrid cloud to our customers. We now have an incredible platform with VCF. We've got a great partnership with Broadcom, and that's going to only accelerate our customer's journey. So really excited with what VCF 9 holds and look to continue building on that platform.

>> William Lam, distinguished engineer, platform engineer, and architect at Broadcom. Patrick Webb, delivery director of virtualization at AHEAD. Guys, thanks so much for sharing on the VCF 9, the golden path to the modern cloud.

William Lam

>> Thanks for having us.

Patrick N. Webb

>> Perfect. Thanks so much for having me, John.

>> Okay, I'm John Furrier here. We are here in the Palo Alto Studios with a special broadcast and presentation of Broadcom VMware, delivering the modern private cloud with the launch of VCF 9. Thanks for watching.