VMware Explore 2025 | Keith Woolley, University of Bristol

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Keith Woolley

Chief Digital and Information Officer

University of Bristol

University of Bristol redefines higher ed IT with private cloud

Digital transformation strategies of the past often revolved around one of two possible choices: Move fast in the public cloud or retain control on-premises — typically at the cost of agility, mounting complexity and technical debt. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 was conceived to redefine what a modern private cloud can be — combining the speed and flexibility of the cloud experience with the performance, governance and cost control enterprises need for on-prem success.University of Bristol’s Keith Woolley talks with theCUBE about VCF 9.0.One institution reaping the benefits of next-gen private cloud is the University of Bristol

play_circle_outline Investment in digital strategy with over 100 million to enhance technology prioritization.

play_circle_outline Goals of harmonizing technology and creating a unified management system for operations.

play_circle_outline Tangible outcomes from improved IT flexibility, including faster grant response times.

play_circle_outline Relationship between sovereignty and borderless education in higher learning institutions.

play_circle_outline VCF's integrated capabilities providing cloud-like flexibility without hyperscaler costs.

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Keith Woolley, University of Bristol

Keith Woolley

Chief Digital and Information Officer University of Bristol

In this VMware Explore 2025 interview, Keith Woolley, CDIO at the University of Bristol, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier and Rebecca Knight to share how one of the UK’s top research institutions is transforming its digital foundation with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Woolley explains how the university tackled the challenge of balancing diverse needs—enterprise operations, cutting-edge research and 30,000+ students—by consolidating onto a flexible, secure and cost-controlled private cloud platform.

The discussion highlights why the University of Brist... Read more

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What changes were made to the technology strategy at the university to improve its operation? add

What was the impact of harmonizing technology and collaborating with VMware on the overall direction and priorities of the VCF? add

What are the changes and improvements made in the IT department at the university, particularly regarding its flexibility and responsiveness to user needs? add

What are the benefits of using VCF in relation to workload management and digital equity in education? add

What are the benefits of using VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) for data center management? add

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Keith Woolley, University of Bristol

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore. We are at The Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, alongside my esteemed co-host, co-founder of theCUBE, John Furrier. John, it is great to be here with you and we're back at VMware.

>> Yeah, the show's rolling along. You got VCF 9.0, obviously the big product, a lot of other things around that with VMware and Broadcom. The on-prem growth right now is super hot. You're seeing a lot of research, a lot of people looking at hybrid cloud, clearly. So, private cloud, hybrid cloud, it's all one thing, it's distributed computing. And what's happening is that the hyperscalers and the supercomputing capabilities coming at a large scale is putting a lot of pressure on groups to figure out what to do. And we got a great use case with a great customer from Broadcom and VMware.

Rebecca Knight

>> Who is actively figuring it out and having some success.

>> No, he has the environment, that's the template.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exactly. Exactly. And with that, I would like to welcome our next guest to theCUBE, Keith Woolley, CDIO, University of Bristol. Welcome back, I should say. You are CUBE alum, Keith.

Keith Woolley

>> Thanks very much, Rebecca. Good morning.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes.

>> Good morning, good afternoon for you in the UK, it's pub time.

Rebecca Knight

>> Too bad we do not have our beers in hand, but why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about the University of Bristol, how many students, how many staff, what you do and your role there?

Keith Woolley

>> Thanks, Rebecca. So, the University of Bristol, one of the major universities in the UK. It's a top five education and research institution. We are around 32,000 students, around 8,000 staff, and we operate across most of the sectors that you'd expect for research, as well as for education.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay.

>> On the technology side, obviously, the evolution and the pressure, because the students, they want the best and the fastest, but you've got the balance of the academic side and the research. Talk about the technology strategy, VCF, what you guys were thinking, how does that intersect?

Keith Woolley

>> So, John, I had several problems I needed to solve when I first joined our organization. So, coming from an environment that had an awful lot of legacy within it, so I need to run our systems that run the university. So, we've got the whole back office that every normal business would have. And then, I have the complication of also being a major R&D organization doing half a billion to a billion pounds of research across the books. And then, I have to manage and work with and educate 30 plus thousand students that all need to have a different environment to operate in. I couldn't do that without having to have a service that I could flex my resources in. So, hence the reason when we looked at our strategy, we thought, "How can we bring a technology platform that would allow me to flex across all those areas, but give me also a single pane of glass to be able to actually manage that within?" And that's how the journey started down our route to VCF.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, a lot of competing priorities, many different constituents with lots of different and requirements. So, talk a little bit about where it all began, what you hoped it would do and what you're seeing right now.

Keith Woolley

>> So, I came from the private sector where technology was something that you needed to be cost-effective with. You needed to make sure that you understood how your models were working and the value that it brought to the organization. When I came into the university, it was very much around universities used to build their own tech. They were leading in that and what had happened was they'd fallen behind and I wanted to make sure that I could influence the sector, start to really modify the way in which higher education was operating. So, in 2019, I sat down and realized that we had a real gap in our digital strategy in the way in which we wanted to operate. And by 2020, the board of trustees had bought into that vision and we made a significant investment in our organization of over 100 million in use case scaling. That was to really revolutionized the way in which we started to think about prioritizing our technology. The main thing we wanted to do was harmonize it. Let's start with the basics. Let's get everything in one place. And at that time, the VCF overall direction was starting to evolve as well. It just came together. The timing was perfect. VMware knew where they were going to go, we knew where we were going to go and we just joined together in force to make this a reality. And we were an early adopter and that's now left us in a position where I have a totally flexible platform. We've got a roadmap into nine, 9.1. We can actually balance our priorities in the tech. We're in a really strong position now to move this forward.

>> So, I got to ask you because the number one question I get, obviously, is with VCF 9.0, obviously Broadcom and VMware subscription, the package is bigger, it's meatier as they say, chock full of stuff.

Keith Woolley

>> Oh, it's huge.

>> It's a beast of technology in there. What was the decision point, you said it came together nicely? Because on one hand I hear, "I'll just move to the cloud," or, "I'll just go another route, I'll rebuild." Demystify that.

Keith Woolley

>> So, there's three elements to out that you've just asked there, John. Go to the cloud. I can't control the costs in the cloud with the hyperscalers, I just cannot control it. So, we've got an academic community that would really consume as much as you were giving them. So, if you're not careful, that cost model's going to run away very, very quickly with us. And so, you're also changing the way in which you need to operate your IT. You end up having a lot of FinOps in there, financial operations in there. So, your costs just move, but you still have all that overhead and cost to be able to run it. And I couldn't actually sit there and say, I can truly control the cost of our organization and especially across 4,000 or 5,000 academics all wanting access into the cloud. If it had gone down the rebuild route, I was then leaving myself in exactly the same position I was in the first place, which was particular point solutions for particular actual academic research capability and I couldn't flex. And one of the words I wanted to change in our organization was very simple. I wanted to remove the word or and replace it with the word and. So, I wanted to build labs that could actually be Windows and Linux, so that we could actually then take the cost efficiency of being able to timetable those spaces more effectively. I needed a platform that allowed me to flex, private cloud does it.

>> So, good. So, the cost is a huge issue. But you brought up something interesting. You said, "Oh, they got to learn FinOps. Basically, the cost of ownership, the hidden cost, the shark fin. What's under the iceberg? What's under the water?" This always comes up in these calculations. I was at a presentation and someone said, "Oh, I can reduce all your costs by 80%." So, cost control, it's kind of like a trap because you said it shifts.

Keith Woolley

>> Yeah.

>> There's a lot of hidden costs in ops. Could you share more about that piece? Because this comes up a lot where people say, "Oh, it looks good on paper," but what specifically comes up? And then two, a lot of people also say that developers are going to drive new top-line revenue to maximize cost. So, you got new agile environments, a bunch of neocloud. "Oh, yeah. Come to us. We're developer-friendly." Because you got developers, you got scientists too.

Keith Woolley

>> Absolutely.

>> So, talk about the cost, the hidden cost trap, and then having a nice development environment.

Keith Woolley

>> Well, the development environment we've now got is in one place. So, I don't have unique boxes sat around a wild estate that I can't control, so I know where everything is right now. So, my cyber ops and everything else, one place. Ingress and egress points, brought them together. And bearing in mind, John, I had ingress and egress points virtually every point within our network. I had 172,000 public IP addresses to contain. So, you can imagine the estate that we were working with. I also had development boxes in scientific areas that I had no visibility of because our academic community, when I actually got underneath the covers as to why don't you come to your digital service partner? Which is your IT service, they were, "You were too slow and you cost too much." So, we couldn't respond to grants or bids and by the time we responded we were too late. So, the academic actually bought the equipment themselves. Now, they can spin it up themselves as though it's cloud. We can cost control it because we know where it is. I can secure it because it's inside our environment and they can administrate it. Now, I also get all the availability of being able to actually build this as well with Kubernetes. So, I can scale out my coding environments, I can build what I need within the containerization. It's a win-win situation for everybody.

>> Yeah. Rebecca, we talk about labor all the time, skilled labor. One of the other hidden costs is the labor. You mentioned the learning FinOps as an example with cloud. You have an estate that's simplified, manageable. So, that's like a big house landscaping Costco. Well, what's going on? There's a Costco ownership. But what I'm hearing here at the show is certification is big for Broadcom, VMware because being certified is going to kick in benefits. You have certifications, you know the playbooks, you know VCF, how much does that factor in? Because people here are taking hands-on labs, there's discovery theaters everywhere, but that certification seems to be a key part of Broadcom, VMware's strategy. How does that help them, one, maintain?

Keith Woolley

>> We too go down the certification path, but we've taken a slightly different route as well, John. I've outsourced the majority of our actual service operations to our partner, Xtravirt. So, when we joined forces to make sure we could actually get a really robust private cloud implementation, we made sure we had the right partner to help us on that journey. So, what started off as a technology provider, stroke, if you like, a level of technical authorship has now completely pivoted into being a trusted partner that actually runs our environment into day-to-day ops. What my team now do is the value add, and that's where we start to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. So, again, part of our digital strategy was very clear. We are going to only in-source where it differentiates. We're going to outsource where it doesn't because we're a fast-moving, highly-responsive environment inside higher education and research. We needed to have that level of agility and flexibility that I could not get by having to have my own team that was constantly being to actually train and to be moving with this platform. So, we brought in partners to help us on that journey. But the strategic partners, they work with us on the whole of our ambition and that's how we've been able to build and to beat the way in which we need to move forward.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, Keith, in talking about those academics who had to either buy the equipment themselves or just wait for the training, wait for the certifications and now can spin it up themselves, can you point to some real tangible business outcomes of research that's gotten done faster and more efficiently, more cost-effectively?

Keith Woolley

>> There's so many cases. Please go to the bristol.ac.uk website, go and have a look at what those use cases are. We've now got case studies where our academics write about the fact that the IT department is now flexible. This is a complete different transformation from you're too slow and you cost too much too. You are now agile and you can actually build that. So, in life sciences where we need to have the demarcation to how we can do secure research, they can actually spin that up themselves going to our portal. We've built it so we've got particular T-shirt sizes and the way in which our equipment works, the way in which you can actually get your server platforms. Your need, the way in which you need that to work. But the other side of this is we can also show governance and people forget about the governance side of things. It's very easy to spin up a load of services, but I can now turn around and say to our research funders, this is a sovereign data center. You can see where the data is and you can audit the policies in which we've built these things with. So, our security policies are fully auditable, whereas before, we couldn't do that.

>> Yeah, I think you're onto something really big there, and I've been commenting on theCUBE pod about this all the time. Sovereignty is huge.

Keith Woolley

>> Absolutely.

>> Okay, sovereign cloud is real and then sovereign AI is right behind it. But you guys also have a mission called borderless education. Okay. So, I'm like, okay, sovereignty means sovereignty, borderless means non-sovereignty. But here's what I've been riffing on. I want to get your reaction to this. You can't have borders without sovereignty first.

Keith Woolley

>> Correct.

>> So, take me through the thinking there because this is where it really hits the flywheel. Once you nail your sovereignty, your estate, everything's manageable, you produce demonstrable results, then you can collaborate in a secure, quantifiable with lineage attribution. Am I getting that right?

Keith Woolley

>> Yeah, absolutely.

>> All right. what's your reaction to that?

Keith Woolley

>> So, again, one of the benefits about what we're doing with VCF is you can actually move your workloads through your hyperscalers, should you need to do so, and then bring them back. So, you've got the benefit of being able to work in your hyperscalers. The reason we went to a boundless education and research model was to make sure that we wanted to get digital equity for our student community. So, no matter where you were in the world, you should be able to come to our university and collaborate or be educated. But what I needed to be able to do is to make sure that we could keep that data security in the right place, that you could actually have the right speed and power of compute. So, alongside VCF, we also built a whole virtual desktop environment, which at the time was a VMware product, now is a fully integrated VDI product. So, we can now come along and you can now from anywhere in the world link into our VDI environment into our VCF cloud and work within the same compute and actual data sovereignty that we have across the globe.

>> Rebecca and I were zooming out, talking about the show and VCF launched, VCF 9.0 we covered on theCUBE, obviously. I think your partner was on theCUBE as well. And it's a whole new business dynamic going on with Broadcom. Let's zoom out. Share your thoughts on what VCF 9.0 means to the world because everyone who has VMware, a lot of people do, are now looking at their future transformation. What does VCF 9.0 mean? I think you guys are a template for on the large scale, but also boundaryless, borderless, it's all kind of the same thing. Everyone wants to be that.

Keith Woolley

>> Yeah. So, for me, it was the ability to have an enterprise developed cloud that we weren't thinking about ourselves. So, I wasn't making up how to put this thing together. It wasn't component parts and people look at the way in which VCF worked and other product sets. They were independent products that you had to basically understand how to stitch together to stitch them together securely and well. VCF comes together across the whole platform. I get a cloud, I get the ability to operate every part of that, whether it's the network, the security, the storage, the server capability, CPU, GPU, RAM, memory, the whole lot. It's all there in one package on one pane of glass. So, I get the ability to run as a hyperscaler, but not with the cost of a hyperscaler. I get all that flexibility and I can migrate my data centers wherever I need them to be. Once I start to run out of floor space, I can extend my data center anywhere I want and still have it on a single management pane. So, we are not bound by any technology gap now. Now, yes, we've bought into the VMware and Broadcom solution, absolutely, 100%. The same way people are brought into other major technology providers. You have to today if you want to operate your business, but it gives me the flexibility where I can move between the hyperscalers.

>> So, you have a cloud which gives you the cloud which you need and all the benefits you just talked about earlier when you went into great detail. My question really comes down to... There's a fear like, wow, I can't go cloud, but they call it private cloud. I mean that's their name, but it's really just a cloud. I mean it's distributed computing. So, you connect to the hyperscalers, you connect to other environments that aren't yours. There's no real limitation or... It sounds like there's no limitation to you.

Keith Woolley

>> I don't see the limitation. I don't feel the limitation. Again, with having an outsourced partner also working with me really helps. So, whereas before you might say, well, you've got to have a life cycle management on your hardware still, you're running your own data center. That is absolutely correct, John. We are accepting that that is an overhead that comes alongside this product set, but it's an overhead that gives me the cost reductions that I get from not having a hyperscaler for my steady-state flexible business that I need to have today. My business flexes so much I need to be able to stand up resources for a research grant and then stand it down again. So, the beauty about having that flexibility means that when I've made a purchase in my hardware stack, I can move that across the whole of my seasonal business and get the absolute benefit from it constantly. And we can now sweat that asset 24-7. So, when it's not actually doing educational research, it's doing high-performance compute overnight. So, I actually can actually alter the way in which I pro forma all of that resource. We get 24 hours a day use out of it, rather than just part use.

>> So, you get leverage?

Keith Woolley

>> Constant leverage.

>> And you can buy gear, whatever you'd like, whatever's coming out, the latest, greatest GPUs, CPUs, XPUs, no problem?

Keith Woolley

>> And we mix and match those. And so, we've partnered a lot with Nvidia. We do a lot of work on our AI platforms with our Nvidia partners, but that's going to also change in the way in which we're opening up the computational stacks that I see in VCF 9.0, 9.1. We're going to be able to bring in other XPUs as we go. One of the requests I've made is, "When can I start plugging my quantum processors into this?" And so Chris Wolf's looking at me at the moment going, "Okay, we've got a challenge there, but let's talk about it."

>> Well, Quantum Readiness Day is coming up. And quantum is a great one because people are getting ready for quantum-

Keith Woolley

>> Absolutely....

>> because the NIST standards are aligning. So, what's really going on there that's nice is it's an inflection point like AI. So, that's going to give you more capabilities. And so, this is, again, more change coming for you.

Keith Woolley

>> Well, we are designing quantum processors. We're at the leading, bleeding edge. And we've now got a quantum processor you can put into a 13-amp socket. You are going to start seeing an awful lot happening in the quantum market. So, once we start seeing the actual quantum processor being built on top of a GPU and a CPU, so you can get the actual light streams as well, we're going to see data centers take a different path.

>> Jensen Huang said, "Oh, 10 years," and I said, next five years it's going to happen. Now, the inside baseball is three to five years, quantum will arrive on the scene. Some say bad guys will come in first, that's why the readiness right now. There's a lot of awareness on... This is a little plug out there for Quantum Readiness Day. But if you don't get ready for it and write the new algorithms and software and roll your keys, people are harvesting and decrypting right now on quantum.

Keith Woolley

>> Absolutely.

>> It's a big problem.

Keith Woolley

>> It's a massive problem, which is why if you are responsible for the way in which you're going to be building your hybrid infrastructures and you are responsible for trusting that all of your skills are in your staff and you are going to have different levels of skilled staff across your organizations, being able to leverage into something like a private cloud, where out of the box it comes ready with security, you can implement through scripts that you can check, you can audit, you can tune, you can share best practice around the globe with people that know what they're really doing. That's how you're going to start to beat this.

>> Rebecca, that this has come up a lot and you and I have talked about this in the past. The quantum decisions being made for budgets, risk management today, not necessarily an innovation agenda, like AI, I've been asking people, "If you can go back to 2017, knowing what you know today, what would you do differently?"

Rebecca Knight

>> Ooh, that's a good one.

>> Gen AI. And they all say, "I'd clean my data up. I'd be tagging." Because if you know it's coming, they would be like... Now, Quantum's like that. If you don't grind out the ops, it's a risk management. So, flipping it forward with VCF 9.0, this sounds like there's a lot of risk management in there for you because most innovation opportunity as well, that's top-line, but risk management is a huge factor. Can you share your thoughts on how you view that element? Not a lot of people talk about the risk management.

Keith Woolley

>> Well, we started from a risk management approach. That was the first conversation I had at the university. How do we actually drive down risk? And if you've got a complex estate that's very, it's in a state that you can't control. You can't see everything simultaneously. It's in a position where you've got ingress and egress points all over your environment, your risk profile's significantly higher. So, my first point of contact was how as the CDIO do I manage risk more effectively? How do I drive down the exposure to the organization? How do we reduce our cyber risk posture? And that's where the whole journey came from. It didn't necessarily come from flexibility, because flexibility, I had that. I had servers sat everywhere that people could access in whatever way they wanted.

>> It was very flexible, but not secure and manageable.

Keith Woolley

>> You could argue it was far too flexible for what we needed to do and we needed to have a greater level of control and governance around it. That was just part of our natural journey as the leader of the organization responsible for digital governance, that's where you are actually starting to take your first posture stance from the rest started to fall into place. And we are constantly monitoring how we can drive down risk, but at the same time, making sure that when I think about my role at the university, and I sum it up very clearly on, it's my job to make working here easy. So, if I can take the friction out so that we can attract the best staff, the best academics, that then bring with them the best research, and you then get the best student pools that you can possibly have, you end up having a highly-successful organization that's doing the world's best research that it can and being totally innovation in the way in which it operates. That's the role of what I do, and this platform helps me do it.

Rebecca Knight

>> And that really is leadership in the sense of, I want to make your job easy. I want to remove obstacles. I want to create efficiencies. I want to also have my employees, my workers engaged and enjoying what they do because when they're more engaged, they're going to do better work. So, as you are the poster child for VCF 9.0 here to share your wisdom and your success stories, what is next for you for University of Bristol?

Keith Woolley

>> Well, we're not even looking at 9.1 next because we've actually put that on the roadmap. That's done, right? So, that's already there. So, the way in which we're thinking about making sure the multi-tenancy side works and making sure that we can do enterprise-grade collaboration and research across the globe with secure partners. That's already in our roadmap. So, now it's very much around how do we push Broadcom to do what they're going to do next? So, how can we work in partnership with Broadcom to start to really reimagine how we're going to start thinking about AI, the next stages of AI? We're a highly-privileged university in the fact that we do have one of the world's highest-performing supercomputers now with the Isambard AI solution that we are hosting on behalf of the UK government, that's got 5,300 Grasshopper and Nvidia chips in it. So, we've got some amazing, amazing technology in our organization. So, it's now how can we work in partnership with Broadcom for the next gen? What does that look like?

Rebecca Knight

>> Oh, that is a big question to end on, but thank you so much Keith Woolley for joining us. A fascinating conversation.

Keith Woolley

>> And thank you again.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise news and analysis.