Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud, NA/EMEA | Event Wrap with Christophe Bertrand

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Christophe Bertrand

Principal Analyst

SiliconANGLE & theCUBE

VCF 9 goes live: Recapping the execution roadmap for Broadcom’s AI and cloud infrastructure vision

With the launch of VMware Cloud Foundation 9, Broadcom Inc. is signaling a bold step into the future of hybrid cloud infrastructure. Positioned at the intersection of AI, cyber resilience and operational efficiency, VCF 9 represents a strategic reset poised to redefine how enterprises manage cloud and data workloads at scale.As the post-VMware-acquisition timeline unfolds, how does this update play into Broadcom’s larger vision for enterprise cloud computing, specifically with AI in the mix?“I think the first question was around whether they’re investing — yes, clearly they are,” said Christophe Bertrand (pictured, right), principal analyst at theCUBE Research

play_circle_outline Introduction of Broadcom VMware's VCF 9 and its significance post-acquisition.

play_circle_outline Discussion on VMware's significant price increase and customer retention strategy.

play_circle_outline Insights on the necessity of resilient infrastructure for effective AI and cloud applications.

play_circle_outline Discussion of data security and governance requirements in the context of AI and sovereign cloud.

play_circle_outline The significance of unified platforms for workloads, data management, and compliance governance.

play_circle_outline Considerations for customer adoption and actual usage of VCF 9's features.

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Event Wrap with Christophe Bertrand

Christophe Bertrand

Principal Analyst SiliconANGLE & theCUBE

TheCUBE Research’s Christophe Bertrand joins John Furrier, co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media, Inc., at the “Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud” event to examine the launch of VMware Cloud Foundation 9. Their conversation unpacks how Broadcom is reshaping private cloud infrastructure through strategic investments in cyber resilience and hybrid cloud.

Bertrand outlines the key enterprise benefits of VCF 9, from data protection and AI scalability to simplified deployment and sovereignty. The segment also explores Broadcom’s alignment wit... Read more

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What are the key highlights and developments related to the VCF 9 launch of Broadcom VMware? add

What are the concerns regarding VMware's ability to maintain its customer base and add value amid pricing changes? add

What are the benefits and considerations of adopting version 9.0 VCF despite potential increases in licensing costs? add

What are the key considerations for achieving cyber resilience and scalability in modern IT infrastructure? add

What is the assessment of VMware's unification of the platform for workloads, particularly in relation to distributed computing, governance, security, and data policies? add

What role will the usage of VCF 9 play in VMware's strategy and the potential return on investment for clients in the context of AI projects over the next few years? add

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Event Wrap with Christophe Bertrand

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>> Hello everyone, to theCUBE here in the Palo Alto Studios for a special presentation with Broadcom VMware, delivering the modern private cloud. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with Christophe Bertrand, who's the head analyst at Research for CUBE Research. Christophe's been covering cyber resilience, data protection, data security, and of course hybrid cloud infrastructure. Christophe, great to have you on here to break down and analyze the VCF 9 launch of Broadcom VMware. A lot of promises made with the acquisition. Hock Tan kicked off the event, introduced the news. This is a milestone. This is going to be where the rubber hits the road for VMware, Broadcom, because they doubled prices. They told all the customers, "We're going to reinvest, simplify the portfolio." VCF is a nice package. It delivers a payload, a good punch of value if you're using it. But it's cleaner. But the numbers are great. VMware, from my reporting looks like they're having a banner year from a financial standpoint. Customers aren't leaving as much. But there's a lot in here. VCF 9 was that promise. What's your analysis? What's your take? Did they deliver?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yes.

>> We'll cover all that, but let's just jump in with your analysis.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Not a loaded question at all, John. Thank you very much.

>> We'll unpack all that.

Christophe Bertrand

>> But I guess I'm on the spot. So a couple of things. First of all it's a version 9.0, I want to point out. I mean, it takes a long time to get to this level of product and platform, so kudos to the teams that have built it. To your point, yes, they've built it and they continue building it. So I think the first question was around are they investing? Yes, clearly they are. The other point is I look at the package and what they're trying to do. It's really multipronged. Really where in the era now where sovereignty and AI are going to be key and we'll have to break that down. But one of the prerequisites is to have infrastructure that can scale, number one. Infrastructure that is super secure, cyber resilient, number two. And of course there's whole data component to AI, but if we just focus on infrastructure for a second, you have to simplify operational efficiencies. You have to be able to empower the organization to fully control its deployments, its costs, no surprises. It has to be hybrid, multi-cloud, flexible, et cetera. There are so many dimensions to it. And I think this platform delivers on it through the partnerships, like the Nvidia partnership for example, but also through some innovations in existing components to make the product, again, scalable and extremely powerful.

>> Yeah, one of the things that I've been watching with VMware because of the dynamics and all the press and all the scuttlebutt is will the community be resilient for VMware? Will the price doubling or price changes in the consolidation of pricing stay effect? And how much leakage will they have in terms of customer base? And by the way, VMware's position was, "Stay with us. We're going to add more value." This is one of those proof points. It's working. You're seeing that happen. Now, here's my take. I think one of the things that, I won't say lucky strike, but momentum wise, VMware got lucky because the wave of AI is bringing in a new era for infrastructure, you pointed that out. I think the combination of their simplicity of the platform combined with the private cloud positioning in a distributed computing environment sets themself up for delivering cloud-like functionality. They don't have to be on Amazon. By the way, the Amazon tax is not on-prem. So if you're a SaaS vendor, like Snowflake, you pay Amazon because you using Amazon. But a lot of data centers on premises will want to use a cloud, like VCF, and they don't have to pay the tax because it's their infrastructure, they've got to buy it. So, one, VMware gets that cash. But, two, the AI wave really gives them a lift. And I think this is something that I think VMware got lucky maybe a little over the top, but I think the timing of their AI wave... I mean, they were in private AI, but real enterprise and sovereign cloud on country, so to speak.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right.

>> You can almost coin that term, right? Because on country is like on-prem. I don't need to run it on country, keep that data there. So if you're a multinational, you can keep the developer experience. You got your Kubernetes, you got all that good stuff. So this really kind of plays well. What's your reaction to that? Because everything, if that happens, everything that we've been talking about, cyber resilience, data security, all play into it, the private AI. What's your reaction to all that?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, first of all, let's not confuse price and cost, right? The one thing about this new version 9.0 VCF is it brings in a lot of operational efficiencies, simplified UI or experience. They're claiming 10X improvements in number of areas, which I'm not going to question. I believe that's extremely doable. And so, yes, maybe the licensing has gone up a little bit. At the end of the day, if you end up empowering your people and using fewer of them or giving them more ability to really fully manage this new era of this cloud-like experience you need to have across your infrastructure, then you are winning. So I think that's the first one I want to make. Now, everybody will have to make their own calculation, but I think the point about sovereign cloud is a very important one. Why? Because it kind of means everything. You have to be cyber resilient, you have to be flexible to work on-prem or in the quasi-cloud type of experience, maybe even some public cloud to a large extent. You have to have capabilities to protect your infrastructure against the cyber attackers who are using AI themselves. And just look at what they're doing with VMware live recovery. And I love the clean room capabilities they bring to the table. From a scalability standpoint, I love the partnership with Nvidia, the GPU as a service. I mean, you think about all of these things. And by the way, the one platform for containers, Kubernetes and VM, NVMS, I mean that's again a unification factor here. So a lot of these end up playing into both the economic dimension and the technology improvements that you were mentioning. So I think they've delivered a lot in this platform. Now the question will be will people use it and use it more? Because that's really where the full value will come into play. And I think it's going to be a factor of the projects they have and where a lot of those sovereign cloud investments go.

>> Well, I mean if you look at what they've done with the sovereignty, because I think sovereignty is kind of a term that can mean many things. But certainly from... it means managing your infrastructure. And I think the scalable AI infrastructure and the way they're handling that is great. If they can get this adoption, then the whole goal of VCF was to reduce all the skews and then you get everything. So use it or lose it kind of velocity and they want people to turn it on. The question I have for you is that if... And you covered this in your last Cyber Resilience summit a of couple months ago, I forget what month that was. There's a lot of stuff that's operational. So I have to ask you, when you squint through the news, operationally does it hang together? Scaling, workloads seamlessly integrating, security by design, recovery, data security, will they have that resilience layer? Because you covered it like a blanket on your last event, share your thoughts on what are the table stakes as VCF 9 comes out, and what are the challenges they have. And how should customers think about the operational side of VCF 9?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. So here's the thing, you need resiliency by design, otherwise you cannot get anything done anymore. It's very simple. So actually part of what we did with cyber resilience is some of this research, and one of what's going to keep you awake at night in the next 12 to 18 months if you ask the 600 people we talked to, number two... Data security, and number two was AI powered or AI fueled cyber attacks. So of course there is a lot of concern about that. I think having cyber resiliency by design is really what this platform gives you in multiple ways. It gives you also recoverability, because something may happen. Invariably something will happen. That's where the live recovery piece, which I've been closer to through the years, comes in. But I think a lot of other things they're doing, micro segmentation and providing a lot of the built-in capabilities within the platform itself to really expand that. So cyber resiliency is almost the foundational piece, I would say. But everything's fun and games until you add "at scale" at the end of the sentence.

>> Exactly.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And this is an at scale game. And clearly with the other, like the unified experience they bring to the table, I think they're really building all of the pieces or they have built all of the pieces and are really assembling them so that IT professionals, and that role is changing, can work hand in hand with security professionals and with compliance governance professionals. I mean, you talk about serving cloud, it's a governance play too. It's not just about the data, it's really about how you do things, where you do things and what regulations allow you to do in your own country. And there are some interesting conversations we've had during this event. Certainly I have had one where there are worlds in which you have to do things in a certain way and you need that cloud-like experience and you can be managing the same platform across a variety of businesses. How do you do that? Well with this.

>> Well, first of all, your summit was awesome. I know you got another summit coming up. When is that coming up?

Christophe Bertrand

>> It's coming up at the end of the month of June. It's data protection and AI. And we also have another summit around compliance and governance in age of AI coming up in September timeframe. So lots of summits coming up and lots of topics.

>> You know what's really interesting is the area you're covering in a very meaningful way on the whole cyber resilience isn't just a security play, you mentioned governance. That's sovereignty kicks in. The big theme this year, if you look at all the events, we're now in June, early June, we look back and say, okay, Databricks, Snowflake, AWS... Unified is a buzzword that's been thrown out. This is a core theme. One of the things about VCF 9 is the unified platform for all workloads around vSphere Kubernetes Service. It's a core service. This is actually interesting because Kubernetes is leading the way in the GenAI wave as platform engineering sets the table stakes. So the question for you is how do you feel about VMware's unification side of the platform for workloads? Because if you can unify the workloads, run your AL, AI and ML pipelines and GenAI across distributed computing, including sovereign clouds, you have the infrastructure. Okay? It's not like public versus private, it's distributed computing. What's your assessment of the unification side of it? And does that play well into the stuff you're covering in terms of the checkboxes, governance, security, data policies? Because this is what is under the hood.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah, absolutely it does. I think that's what I started with, the operational efficiency, the unified platform. I think that was very fundamental, no question. I think the biggest issue around AI today is where is the ROI? And you hear a lot of organizations struggling as they deploy AI in terms of where can they get that ROI? And one of the issues that they're going to have is managing an infrastructure that can or can't scale, having the right tools in place. So I think VCF 9.0 really answers some of these questions from an infrastructure standpoint. I think there's a whole other conversation around data, which we can talk about separately. And all of these come into play. So what I'm seeing is really almost a perfect combination or conflation of markets, or combination of markets. Cyber security meets data protection, data infrastructure, data management meets cloud and meets governance. So all of these are really in play right now. So that's why it can be very confusing for a lot of organizations, especially in the light of all of the other investments happening around data platforms such as the vendors you've mentioned. By the way, I should also mention, look at what's going on in the SaaS world with Salesforce acquiring Informatica. I mean, who would've thought, right?

>> Yeah.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, it makes perfect sense when you think about it.

>> I mean, it's covering compliance right there.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Exactly. And the fact that there's data in the middle of everything in order to get return investment in AI. So I think what you're seeing is really an interesting shift in the market. I think you were right with your analysis earlier. By design, by chance, they pick the right time, they've got the right platform, they're hitting the wave at a time when it's extremely formative. I think really the proof will be in the pudding. It will be in the execution. Will the users, will the customers use the platform and expand on it? And if they do, then I think it's going to be a big win for the longterm.

>> You think usage and really taking advantage of VCF 9 will be the key goal for VMware going forward?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely. It's like if you don't use it, you lose it sort of thing.

>> Yeah.

Christophe Bertrand

>> I think you have to use it. More importantly, I think that's where they will, the clients, the end users, will see the ROI come to fruition. And I think the fact that there are so many AI projects, et cetera, going on, people need to have certainty. And it's not just ticking the box. In a sense, yes, I think there's so much that needs to happen. You need to have that secure infrastructure in place. It has to be scalable. They bring a lot to the table. What I'm curious to see is where will the battle lines be drawn in the next three to four years as AI projects really come to fruition and we see more agentic AI and more evolved developments there?

>> I think you're right about the usage. In fact, Hock Tan, when he made all the announcements around the simplification with Krish and the team on VCF Division, he said, "We are going to invest," and there was a promises made. One, consolidate and simplify. Reminds me of the old Steve Jobs days when we streamlined the Mac line. And so, okay, the numbers are there. They got the AI wave. They have the core underpinnings with Kubernetes service and all the things under the hood that was part of VMware cleaned up.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And the data services.

>> And the data services, governance and security. And now it's going to be what does the customers do with it? So I have to ask you, we're living in a modern financial operational world now with sovereignty and hybrid cloud and distributed computing. What are some of the deep operational cost visibility issues involved? Could you share your thoughts on are they transparent? Are they looking at costs? Can they give the cost visibility into it? And what does the TCOs look like? I mean, because now you start getting into, okay, I'm using it. If I'm the customer, I'm like, "Okay, you have me at VCF 9. I'll look at it. Okay, I see some investment promises made, promises delivered. Let's put it to work." What's the TCO look like?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right.

>> What are the costs? Has does it compare versus hyperscalers? I mean, these are questions.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right, no, these are great questions. I think, again, we'll have to... We haven't tested the platform, we haven't validated it, so we're going to go with some of the claims here. I think the fact that, first of all, there's a unified platform, you know that's going to give you operational efficiency. So that part I'm not worried about, especially at scale. That's where it's going to come into play. The other part around ROI is also you have to be able to measure. You can't manage or control something you can't measure. They've included a lot of abilities to really measure your consumption, the ability to reclaim capacity, et cetera, et cetera. Lots of goodies in the platform that from a pure economics standpoint really have to be looked at. And I think that's really where you're going to see a lot of the benefits, in the ability to really manage, optimize, which of course, I expect to see some automation there, and at scale, obviously get to that level of TCO you need. Now, I would say I would love to see in the next few months and talk to customers to see what they've done, to see how much they've actually been able to deploy and save with the platform. Because that's really where we're going to see the rubber meets the road really.

>> I mean, the advanced memory tiering is one of the things that jumped out at me as value right there. vSAN, ESA among others. This sovereignty thing I just can't get out of my head because I just see that as a major stealth move by VMware to own the private cloud for essentially on-premises and on-country distributed computing.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right.

>> Because it's not so much cloud repatriation meets sovereignty, it's sovereignty is an example of distributed computing at scale by having on-premise cloud and edge. That's what everyone's talking about. Now. data's got to play into that, all these things factor in. So it's not the cloud repatriation, pull it out of the clouds because it's better on-prem. No, some stuff's really good in the cloud and some stuff's good on-prem.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely.

>> So, again, on-premises is good for VMware because their margins, they get a hundred percent of that. The customers bear the costs.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right.

>> So a cloud strategy that has good economics.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Or is it a cloud strategy or is it an AI strategy? I mean, is it really sovereign AI? Isn't that really the game? I don't think it's that stealth. I think it's very clear with this platform what the play is. But, again, as I like to say often, let's see how people adopt and use the platform more and more and what deployments they have. I think it's a great platform, especially for me it's the GPU as a service, the partnerships and the ecosystem. I mean, there are lots of other partners beyond Nvidia that are part of this ecosystem that are absolutely critical to the infrastructure. So I think the promise, the solution is here. The investments have happened. We have the platform. I would like to revisit, have this conversation in nine months or a year and see where we are at because I think it has the goods.

>> Yeah.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Again-

>> We've been covering like a blanket. We'll definitely do in a year. But I want to ask you more of an industry analyst question, as an industry analyst covering this deeply in a meaningful way, calling the balls of strength, getting into the weeds, also, look at the big picture. If you look at what's going on in the market, there's no doubt that the commitment to build out's happening. AWS announced just in the past three weeks, 50 billion, 20 billion in Pennsylvania for a data center, 10 billion in North Carolina. Just saw another 20 billion in Australia. So, again, the hyperscalers are building out. So are the enterprises. We're spending a huge AI wave for the enterprise coming on because they're deploying and re-architecting their systems. As an industry analyst, what do you hope to do in terms of evaluating Broadcom Vmware's success? What are you looking at? What do you see as things that you want to touch? And what should customers be thinking about that you will serve them?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, I think there are a few dimensions. First of all, I like to keep things simple. Okay? Let's look at the basics for infrastructure. What are the deployments? What type of cyber resiliency have you been able to achieve? How are you meeting your compliance requirements? There are so many regulations also appearing around governed AI, which totally plays into the sovereign cloud positioning and this idea of a modern private cloud. There are some AI workloads that will never be in pure public cloud. There will be some that will be. But I think there are many use cases that will also be very hybrid. So I think it's going to be measuring where the deployments are happening across the customer base. And I think it will be a factor of where AI projects go. And those have to be well managed, right? In a sense that they have to be reasonably narrow to provide ROI, but reasonably broad to provide value to business processes. And that's where I think where a lot of enterprises are struggling. Well, this platform then gives them the ability to control the infrastructure to do that and scale it as they go, which is I think the most important thing. So maybe three levels of measure. First of all, customer adoption. Where are we today, where will we be at the end of the day, that's the easiest number. I don't know how we measure that. We'll definitely talk-

>> No, ask VMware.

Christophe Bertrand

>> We'll ask VMware. I'll talk to them about that, for sure. But I think that's going to be where... And then I want to see also what components of the platform around resiliency, around security, how is that being adopted? What type of customer stories do they have? And then what type of workloads do they see actually at play on VCF 9? And I think that's going to be interesting to see as well.

>> Yeah.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So lots of questions we'll have. It's probably going to take a couple of quarters to start getting visibility. And I would say in the next year or so, we'll get a better sense.

>> Well, I definitely will want to follow up with you on that and also check that against what VMware's conjecture is, what they're saying. I'm looking at from a macro standpoint, two things, siloed organization, who's still siloed, because if you're siloed, you're screwed.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right.

>> And then the main thing with VMware is their ecosystem evolution. Over the past year, we've seen decimation of the ecosystem. I mean, essentially it went from one thing where a thousand flowers are blooming, a lot of engagement, a lot of community, VMUG was leading the organizations. And then it went through a year of kind of like nuclear winter. It went down and things change inside VMware. Now you're starting to see the ecosystem change and growing in a more intentional way. Less of a free for all, more of still community. VMUG is more relevant. Hock Tan loves VMUG apparently, from my reporting. But the ecosystems are not as many partners, but bigger partners. They're engineering in there, because you're talking about scale and AI. You got a lot going on. This isn't just resell VMware, this is integration. So we're starting to see Broadcom and VMware think like, "Okay, long game, intentional partnerships, engineer in." What's your reaction to that? Obviously it's happening, but this means that the ecosystem may not be as big, but just as powerful. As an analyst, how do you read that?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, I think we should just look at the press release. I mean, who's quoted in the press release? And you get your answer, I think you answered it, which is, yeah, maybe it's not less of a channel play, more of a big infrastructure partner plays, like the Microsoft, the Google Cloud. I mean, Dell. I mean there are so many names. Nvidia we talked about. I think there's also HP, Lenovo. I mean, I may have forgotten a few. I think that's exactly what the makeup is of the infrastructure today. And, again, no infrastructure, no cyber resilient infrastructure, no AI friendly, sovereign AI friendly infrastructure, no business. That's the future. But, again, we still have a few years before this all plays out.

>> I think there'll still be a channel play, but it won't be as relevant in terms of the integration part, as we're going to see. We'll see all this play out in Broadcom's VMware Explorer coming up in end of August, early September. Certainly the buzz is more targeted, much more intentional. Again, this is VCF 9, a lot going on with the hood. Christophe, great to have you on. While we got you here, give some insight into your vision of your summits. You're hosting multiple times a year a summit that's more product led, unpacking deeper dives around some of the core data security, cyber resilience, governance. Give a quick commercial for what you're working on.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah. Absolutely. So we've covered cyber resiliency in a January timeframe actually. It's on demand, so it's really on all the time. And we're going to be looking at data protection and AI, really how do you protect AI from itself? How do you leverage AI in data protection processes, right? So it's this weird relationship where AI is the attacker, the protector, the infrastructure you have to protect and maybe turns on itself too, starting to maybe destroy data. So lots of conversations. We're going to try to give people a 360 on that. And then with one of my colleagues, Scott Hebner, focused on AI, we'll talk about compliance and governance in the age of AI and what do you need to worry about. Not only governing data, but also governing AI itself. And actually don't be surprised if we come up with maybe a stage model or maturity model of what organizations should be doing and how to go from left to right to the nirvana of AI. So that's what we're looking at for the rest of the year.

>> Who should participate in this? Who are you looking to engage with? What kind of personas? Is it the product manager for security? Is it just data protection and recovery? I mean, backup, that world, or is it more... Can you be more specific on who should be leaning in with you on this?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yes, some of our sponsors are vendors in a space of data protection, backup recovery, data management, infrastructure pretty widely, and also services companies. Again, we want to provide a 360 view of the market to the end users so they can make the right decisions. Yeah.

>> Got it. All right, Christophe, great to have you on theCUBE, breaking down the action here as part of the Broadcom VMware special modern private cloud launch. VCF 9 is out, promises made, promises delivered. We will continue to unpack the promises and what it's going to mean for the customer. Stay tuned to theCUBE, and of course go to theCUBEresearch.com to get all the deep dive information on how this all plays out. There's a lot of stuff going on under the covers. Again, with Kubernetes and platform engine booming, a lot of the other platform elements will come into play for large-scale AI infrastructure, sovereign cloud, among other things. Thanks for watching.