VMware Explore 2024 | Krish Prasad | Broadcom

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Krish Prasad

Senior Vice President and General Manager, Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation Division

Broadcom

Unpacking VCF 9: The culmination of VMware’s focus on platformization

Much was made of Broadcom Inc.’s recent acquisition of VMware. Following the move, a streamlined ethos guided the de-siloing and reorganization of VMware’s disjointed portfolio. The result is a move toward platformization and VMware Cloud Foundation 9, known as VCF 9.VMware’s Krish Prasad unpacks VCF 9 with theCUBE’s John Furrier.“Coming into the acquisition, we took all the product teams, which were organized as siloed business units, and brought them together to one division,” said Krish Prasad (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of the VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom Inc

play_circle_outline Introducing VCF 9: The Next Generation Platform Unifying Products in Cloud Transition

play_circle_outline Maximizing Efficiency: The Transition to Integrated Private and Cloud Operations

play_circle_outline Jumpstart Adoption Programs & The Subscription Pricing Shift: Modernizing Infrastructure in Today's Market

play_circle_outline Future of private cloud in data processing & security with VCF

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Krish Prasad | Broadcom

Krish Prasad

Senior Vice President and General Manager, Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation Division Broadcom

Krish Prasad, senior VP and GM of VMware Cloud Foundation Division, discusses updates on VCF 9, offering a platform deployable on private infrastructure, on-prem, or in the cloud for a consistent experience. Customers now deploy workloads on-prem and in the cloud, seeking seamless platform integration. VCF 9 offers automated workload migration, subscription pricing shift, and aims to meet evolving IT needs. Programs like Jumpstart and free training are included to ease VCF adoption. Private clouds will be crucial for data processing, especially with generativ... Read more

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What was announced today regarding VCF 9 and what changes were made in the organization of product teams? add

What are some key conversations with customers at the VMware Explorer 2024 show regarding the transition to the new Broadcom VMware and the importance of a platform that can run both on-prem and in the cloud with a consistent experience? add

What are some of the strategies and programs implemented by Broadcom to help customers successfully adopt their products? add

What are the advantages of using VCF as a platform for protecting data in a distributed computing environment? add

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Krish Prasad | Broadcom

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>> Welcome back, everyone. Live CUBE coverage here on the floor in Las Vegas for VMware Explorer 2024. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with Krish Prasad, senior vice president, general manager of the VMware Cloud Foundation Division, VCF, the core product with Broadcom VMware. Krish, great to see you. Thanks for coming on.

>> Yeah, good to see you again.

>> He's the Man of the Hour. VCF the core flagship offering, simplified, all those SKUs boiled down into a handful of products. They're running a tight ship.

>> Yes.

>> A lot of transition, conversations, but you to see the light at the end of the tunnel and you've made some good progress. We've been following your launch prior to here. Again, more updates. More feature-rich on things that were on the road map now done.

>> Yes. Yeah, I mean I think today we announced VCF 9, which is, think of it as the next generation of VCF. One of the fundamental changes we made, John, as you know, coming into the acquisition is we took all the product teams, which were organized as siloed business units and we put it together to one division, which is the division that I run. And the reason we did that is because we want to deliver a platform, not a set of products that are integrated. And so that's what VCF 9 is all about. It's a well integrated platform that customers can deploy in their private infrastructure, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud, and really get a very consistent experience like a AWS type model within on-premise and also in the cloud.

>> And certainly with gen AI there's a big pressure to more on-prem part with data being the value proposition-

>> Yeah, exactly....

>> proprietary intellectual property with data. What's the key conversations with customers at this show? Obviously the customer environment, the partner environment, going through the transition to the new Broadcom VMware, what are some of those conversations here at VMware Explorer 2024?

>> I mean, it's actually amazing because a lot of the customers are now... Five years ago, customers were, "Hey, we are taking our workloads to the public cloud and then our on-prem will be just a legacy setup." That has significantly changed because the cost of the public cloud is spiraling out of control in many of these customers cases. So they're taking a much more balanced approach. Not that they're not using public cloud, but it's much more balanced. They are deploying several workloads on-prem and in the cloud, and they're looking for a platform that can run in both places and have a consistent experience. And that's what VCF brings to the table. So from a strategy standpoint, it's right on. Customers love what we are doing because it's exactly what they need because you don't want to have different experience when you go to the cloud versus on-prem.

>> It's funny, Andy Jassy used to say, "Why would they want to build the data in hot cans? Why would they want the cloud?" Basically is what he said. That's my word, it's not his. Enterprises have long struggled with siloed architectures, as you mentioned, and just public cloud by itself. Now data centers are getting reset, re-architected for now the gen AI wave. Neither fully delivering on the value by themselves, but together as you point out is key. How are you going to position that? Because we're hearing things that are coming out like seamless migration that wasn't there before. You used to manually have to do professional services to migrate vSphere in with the full management by STDC. Now that's a script.

>> Yeah.

>> Now you've got cool things that's easy. Push a button.

>> Yeah, actually we are doing a very automated movement of workloads from previous versions of either vSphere or even VCF to the newer versions of VCF. And it's going to be fully automated. They don't have to do anything special to move from one version to the next.

>> And again, that's a good note that this new architecture's there. What are some of the challenges with the old architecture, current architectures, siloed in cloud that you guys are solving?

>> I mean, just looking internally, we used to be a set of products, individual products coming out from individual divisions. And so compute would come out at one point in time. Network would be at a different timeline, the storage would be at a different timeline. You cannot deliver a full cloud platform that way because it's all in different timelines, different support, all of that. Now it's all gone. It's all an R&D team that is providing one product, which is a cloud platform, and we are building it all together.

>> Yeah. One of the things being old like us at theCUBE, now 15 years covering VMware, we've seen the movie, many acts of the movie. VMware was a very infiltrated infrastructure in the enterprise and people sold stuff with it, kind of artificially lowered in price in our opinion. We were commenting on that, but now it's recognized that it is now part of the infrastructure. So you've got a transformation going on in multiple phases. You've got the VMware company transformation, the VCF transformation, and the customer transformation because all three are happening at the same time. Share your thoughts on this because I think this is a critical power dynamic that's causing a lot of FUD. There's a lot of misinformation. Clear it up.

>> So from a VMware standpoint, we transformed our organization to set ourselves up to deliver the platform like we discussed. In addition to that, we are transforming going from perpetual to subscription. So one of the things you hear is, "Hey, the pricing has changed. That is creating concerns." But it's really about customers who are on perpetual license going to a subscription license. And as you well know, all the infrastructure providers are on subscription, right? We are actually the last ones to be on perpetual. So we are just catching up with the market. There is nothing artificial about price increase that we are doing, it's just the transition from perpetual SnS to subscription. So that's the second transformation that we are going through. Customers, on the other hand, they were building their own cloud platform or using DIY, "I can build my own and use silo technologies to build it." And they were not seeing the TCO benefits or the operational effectiveness by doing that. And so they are now looking for a platform that they can just deploy, easily deploy without a having to do all the integration themselves. And so the timing is, in a good way, we are hitting it at the right time. And customers are really looking for a solution that will take them fast to the cloud operating model.

>> I think this is why I think the unification message is there. It's not just on premises. You got cloud operations. That's a key part of that customer journey.

>> And what we mean by private is it is about your private infrastructure that you have, but the infrastructure could be on Amazon, it could be on prem, it could be at the edge, but it is still your private infrastructure on which you're running VCF everywhere.

>> VCF 9. What's the highlights there? Give us a quick unpacking of VCF 9 for the folks out watching.

>> Yeah, number one, it's actually a completely... That's why I called it a new generation. It's a completely redesigned solution that delivers it as a platform, not as a set of disparate products. That's the number one change that you'll see. It just goes in very easily and it converts your infrastructure to a cloud. And then all the different pieces, management, operations, all of that is tightly integrated and built in so that you don't have to think about, "Oh, now I have to do the bring this piece and tie it together and all of that." It comes out of the box. And it also has the ability to take previous generations of your infrastructure with vSphere and import it into this new... It's very easy to do. It is automated, so customers will have an easy path to get to this.

>> It's interesting, Krish. We've been talking many times on theCUBE. We've had conversations around this. But if you step back and zoom out, one thing that we see clear in our CUBE research team is that your customers, people we talk to all the time, are saying, "Look, the bar has been raised. Generative AI has raised the stakes of modernizing my infrastructure." So there's a real pressure. And I think this shift is timely because you're saying, "Okay, perpetual license, we're going to clean up our business model," which you just talked about, but also set the table for you to have a subscription, yet not withstanding budget surprises or new pricing, but the value is really going to be at that unification platform because the bar is raised. The stakes are high, but the speed is there. So they're all resetting. They're looking at this as a reset moment for a generation of new apps, new workloads. So this migration with a click of a button, out of the box as you say, seamless, is better than pausing, sending a bunch of people in there, putting all the configs into a file, moving things over, that takes time. This is the new VCF.

>> Yeah, it is easy to deploy, you have fastest time to value. Those are all the things that we are focused on. And then obviously on top of it, we are enabling AI so that the generative AI workloads can run seamlessly on it. And Nvidia just published a bunch of benchmarks where they show that in many cases, our stack with the cloud platform runs faster than bare metal, and so they can come on it. They get the entire platform with VCF running wherever the data is, and they can do the processing closer to the data.

>> Let's talk about the psychology of the customer base and somewhat the partners because kind of related. Those are the two areas that are most on fire and the FUD and the angst or tension and the rough waters right now, but the smooth sailing ahead as we see. The psychology is, "Okay, I'm going to subscription. I've got the platform. I'm building for the future. Okay, buy all that. Makes sense." But I need to see. I've seen CA in the past with Broadcom. If I'm a customer and what we're saying to them and what they're telling us vice versa is that, "Show me the roadmap." Because at the end of the day, you're giving a TCO benefit because migration's hard, they're running critical apps on VMware, it's infrastructure. That's operating. You can't just rip and replace that. What are you going to do? There's not a lot of options. Okay. So your job is to put the roadmap together, the customer, I'm telling them, "Call Krish up. Have him show you the roadmap." That's the tell sign. And Broadcom, and I give Broadcom props for this because it's in their DNA, they build product. And VMware builds product. That's the synergy we've talked about on theCUBE. So the roadmap is the ultimate proof point because I see patterns that I might've seen in other generations of IT mergers and acquisitions, but at the end of the day, you're saying you're going to do stuff, show me.

>> Yes. So there are two things I would say, which is different than how past acquisitions have worked for Broadcom. One is that if you look at how Broadcom has treated VMware, Broadcom is still supporting the entire customer segments all the way from our smaller customers to all the bigger customers. And so we haven't narrowed down the focus. Hock is committed to supplying the entire customer base of 350K customers. So that's one big difference when the previous acquisition. The second one is this whole show is centered around VCF and all the roadmap elements. I mean, there is tons of demos and roadmap sessions where we are actually talking about all the things that are coming. And the biggest thing that is going to affect the roadmap is that we collapse the organization into one business unit or one division that I'm running. It gives us focus, it gives us speed, and you'll see a lot of innovation accelerating coming out of VMware into Broadcom.

>> So listen to the customer, focus on their needs. If you're a partner, engineer in. It seems to be the strategy, not just, "Hang on."

>> Yeah. The key partners like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Fujitsu and so on, I mean, the key for them is do an engineered solution, add value. Take our software, their hardware, put it together into engineered solution, deliver it to customers.

>> And that's going to be a great conversation for theCUBE obviously because it's got a lot of platform engineering involved. It's right in our wheelhouse. Great job. Great job clarifying that. I appreciate that. Okay, let's talk about, I'm the customer, okay, guide me through the approach, okay? I got private-public cloud modernization plans. What do I do? What's the game plan?

>> Yeah, so in fact, one of the big things that we have done in Broadcom is a focus on making customers successful with their adoption. So it is not just about creating the product, it's also putting programs together for adoption. So we have a thing called Jumpstart that comes with the SKU for VCF where we go in and do a cloud maturity assessment. "Hey customer, what do you want to do? Where are you on-prem? Where are on the public cloud? How do you get from where you are to the next stage all the way to the private infrastructure across the public and private with VCF on top?" And so that's something that we have built into the product SKU. Learning and training is now free. It comes with the product. So we are doing a lot of stuff to really enable the customers to get there much faster.

>> And look at their estate, figure out their infrastructure, modernize it.

>> Yeah. And show them the path to get to the full product.

>> Sitting on the beach is no longer an option because the gen AI wave is here. We always see that. Awesome. More broadly, let's zoom out. Private-public cloud, what's your perspective? Obviously, there's a lot of surge in the enterprise on private cloud because of cloud operation. Edge is right there and around the corner. That's another premise as well. What's your view of public versus private?

>> I mean, look, I think public cloud is going to continue to grow. Private cloud is going to continue to grow. That's the situation we are in because customers are deciding which workloads to keep private and which workloads to take to the public cloud. And what we are saying is, "Hey, that's great. Both will grow. But customer, you need a consistent platform that runs across both so that you can easily move the workloads around." And that's what we provide with VCF.

>> Yeah. One of the things that's always been kind of... And we wrote the private cloud brief with Wikibon now called theCUBE Research, almost a decade ago, the future of private cloud, it's almost been kind of like less appealing than hybrid. Obviously hybrid came on board. Public cloud has traditionally been perceived as less appealing versus public cloud. We saw that. What should customers know about VCF's power dynamic in the changing landscape? Because what should they know about the potential of private cloud? What's it for them?

>> The reason why the private cloud was less appealing is because, like I said, most customers who are trying to integrate the silos together themselves and then stitch it together into some kind of experience, and that never got to the experience that the public cloud would provide. And what we are doing with VCF is it's a platform that they don't need to do any integration, deploy it on their infrastructure, and we will give them the experience that they get in Amazon. So it raises the bar, it gets experience to a different level.

>> And that's what Hock Tan was meaning on his keynote when he said, "You get AWS for the on-premises."

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> You get cloud-like-

>> Cloud-like agility....

>> agility, subscription, pay as you go, all of the .

>> Self-service. Self-service. All of that for their developers, right?

>> Okay, great. Future of private cloud. Okay, take us into the future. How do you see that preferred future from your perspective of the future of the private cloud?

>> Yeah, I mean, look, with the generative AI coming in, it's all about data and being able to process your data where the data resides, and then having all the controls around privacy and so on around data. And what we have with VCF is one platform that protects your data wherever the data is residing, whether it's on-prem or in the public cloud or whatever, and you get one layer that ties it all together and with the same policies, the same security and so on. And that's really I think the pure private cloud of AI. It's just on-prem is not going to be the future. It is going to be a combination, but you need a consistent experience tying it all together and consistent security and compliance and all of that. And that's where we will actually shine.

>> I mean, this is a distributed computing environment, heterogeneous platform. And again, VMware is operationally very important in all those big enterprises, they're running workloads.

>> I mean, it's continuing to grow.

>> And the role of the GPUs and chips become very important. Now I heard Dave Vellante and I here in the hallway that Broadcom kind of keeps a wall between the chips. "Does VMware have an edge with VCF on the chip side?" True or false, is there a wall there? Does VMware have access to the chips, custom silicon? We saw Dale on EMC take advantage of say vSAN. You guys unbundled that and let the storage-

>> I wouldn't say wall because vSphere and VCF are open platforms. So in the past we have certified all of Broadcom's hardware because for us to run in a heterogeneous data center, we have to support all the hardware because the customer decides which chips they're going to buy. And so we have supported Broadcom, we have supported Broadcom's competition, and we continue to do that. So we support Broadcom, we support Broadcom's competition.

>> You're operating almost independently.

>> Yeah, it's an open system that's important to our business. We cannot be a cloud software provider without supporting all the hardware.

>> Which happens to Broadcom, chips support, ethernet and all the cool... And they're good.

>> Yeah. And so the chips will win based on their own differentiation. If the Broadcom chip is better than the competition, people will buy that.

>> As we say, let the chips fall where they may, as they say in the industry.

>> Exactly.

>> Okay. Krish, on a personal note, we've had many conversations with theCUBE, your journey, you're now in charge of VCF. What's it like? What's it been like for you? And through this process, share some commentary on your perspective.

>> Yeah, it has been great. I mean, I think the biggest change that you see in Broadcom is that it's no-frills environment, meaning it is very focused. Decisions are made very fast. Hock is not somebody who debates things for months and months, which used to be, by the way, in Vmware. It was more of a consensus environment, so it takes a longer period of time to get to the answer. Broadcom is like, I can make a call now and Hock will make a decision and we move on. And so that's a huge thing. The second thing is, Hock lets me drive the product roadmap. He doesn't come in and, "Hey, Krish, go do that." No, he'd said, "What is right for my business I decide and I run."

>> Well, you can call a Hock and say, "Hey, I want to come on theCUBE with you next time."

>> Yeah, maybe I'll do that. I'll see him today. I'll ask him .

>> Hock, if you're watching, come on. We've got a chair waiting for you. Charlie's been on, the whole Broadcom team. It's really been great to watch. And again, there's been a lot of misinformation. My final question is that, if you can clarify the top-ranked cliches or misinformation, what would you say?

>> Yeah, I mean the biggest thing is look, Broadcom, it's like the typical acquisition where Broadcom is going to invest less and squeeze the VMware product set, especially VCF, which is completely opposite of what is happening. I can tell you that Hock spends 90% of his time every day focused on VCF. It is so important to him and so important to the company that he's focused on it and then we all work together to make it a success. And that's why we are moving very fast.

>> It's interesting, Dave and I were doing a little historical view about VMware from 2010 with Palmer Rich as the CEO all the way through today. It's like VMware, once it got in the hands of EMC, it was just kept producing more cash. So if I'm Hock Tan and the team, I'm like, "Whoa, it's a good business." VMware is a good business.

>> I mean, look, it's a great business because of the customers. Customers love the product. I mean, you can walk around and talk to any customers.

>> Yeah, they do.

>> They say it is one of the best products that they have ever used. And that's why it is difficult for them to move on from it because it satisfies their needs in a great way. And so that's the core of this. It does nothing more than it's a thing that customers love and they have loved it from the days of ESX all the way to now.

>> And product-led growth is another big part of this for you guys as well.

>> Yeah, because-

>> Roadmap's important. Good product market fit.

>> And then customers moving to a cloud operating model is happening everywhere. So it actually fits the VCF story very well.

>> And the subscription, nice little add-on.

>> Yes.

>> Get through the knothole and then smooth sailing.

>> By the way, on subscription, I just want to make a point. We have subscription portability between on-prem and the Cloud. So you can take your VCF license from on-prem, move your workload to AWS and you can take the license with you. And so that's another reason we have to be on subscription because we are allowing portability and it needs to be the same. And you get to AWS.

>> Do they get charged more or they just take their license over?

>> No, just the license over.

>> Azure, Google and AWS?

>> And AWS. And even some of the other ones. Now they have to pay for the managed environment, not for the software.

>> Okay, got it.

>> Okay?

>> Cool. All right, so congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate you coming on and sharing it. And next release next year is peddling as fast as you can.

>> Yeah, just like our major releases. That's the next major release coming out.

>> All right. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Thanks for sharing, and we'll see you tomorrow on theCUBE.

>> All right.

>> Right. Thanks, Krish.

>> Thank you very much Good to see you.

>> All right. Okay, we got the head of VCF. This is a VCF show. Customers, the innovation is there on the table. They're putting it out there. It's a new business model. It's transformation. VMware, VCF, and the customers all transforming at the same time. Of course, we're in theCUBE. We're transforming solutions, engineered solutions coming, more tech talk here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

>> Thank you, John.