VMware Explore 2025 | Krish Prasad, Broadcom & Adam Little, New Belgium Brewing

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Krish Prasad

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

Broadcom

Adam Little

Director of IT Operations

New Belgium Brewing

New Belgium Brewing hops onto VMware’s private cloud platform

This year, New Belgium Brewing Company Inc. is raising a glass to private cloud.Since VMware by Broadcom rolled out VMware Cloud Foundation 9 in 2024, customers such as New Belgium Brewing have tapped into VCF’s private cloud platform. It’s helped the beverage company make adopting artificial intelligence a lot smoother.New Belgium Brewing Company’s Adam Little and Broadcom’s Krish Prasad discuss their companies partnership.“You’ve got to pick an area of your business where you have good, clean data to have AI help you make better decisions with that,” said Adam Little (pictured, left), director of IT operations at New Belgium Brewing

play_circle_outline Introduction to VMware Explore with hosts Rebecca Knight and John Furrier.

play_circle_outline Exploring Innovations and Momentum: Insights from Adam Little of New Belgium Brewing and Krish Prasad of VMware on VCF 9.0

play_circle_outline Why Medium and Small Businesses Embrace Cloud Models Faster Than Large Enterprises: Unpacking the Benefits of Cloud Operations

play_circle_outline Adam Little shares insights on New Belgium Brewing adopting VCF 9.0.

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Krish Prasad, Broadcom & Adam Little, New Belgium Brewing

Krish Prasad

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

Adam Little

Director of IT Operations New Belgium Brewing

In this VMware Explore 2025 interview, theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Rebecca Knight sit down with Krish Prasad, SVP & GM of VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom, and Adam Little, director of IT operations at New Belgium Brewing, to explore how private cloud and AI are reshaping the enterprise.

Prasad shares updates on the momentum behind VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, highlighting customer adoption across both large enterprises and mid-market organizations. He details how innovations - spanning more than 500 enhancements - are enabling c... Read more

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What were the hot topics discussed during the live coverage of VMware Explore? add

What were customers' reactions and sentiments regarding the changes at VMware and the VCF 9.0 product launch compared to the previous year? add

What observations were made regarding the adoption of cloud models by different sizes of companies? add

What factors influenced the decision of certain customers to upgrade to the new version 9.0 and how did they plan their deployment? add

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Krish Prasad, Broadcom & Adam Little, New Belgium Brewing

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of VMware Explore. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, John Furrier. John, two hot topics here.

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> Beer and IT.

>> It's 12 o'clock somewhere, as they say. And we got the leader of VCF in the house here and a great customer, CUBE alumni, and a great use case of where AI is converging in on the physical side. And it's a really great template for what we will see a lot of this year and going forward where technology's blending in with the real world. It's really manufacturing, it's a great use case.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, then let's get into it. So, I'd like to welcome back to our program, I'm going to start with you, Adam Little. He is the director of IT operations at New Belgium Brewing. Welcome back, Adam.

Adam Little

>> Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager of VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom, a dear friend of theCUBE. Thank you so much for coming up back on, Krish.

Krish Prasad

>> Really great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, I'm actually going to start the conversation off with you because you were with us earlier this year for the VCF 9.0 product launch. You've got a lot of momentum going on right now. What are you hearing? And compared to where you were last year, how do things feel different right now?

Krish Prasad

>> I lost my voice being here a couple of days because we had constant meetings with customers from 8:00 AM in the morning till late in the evening. So, a lot of excitement. If you go back a year ago, Hock came in to Explore. Customers came in with a lot of questions about his commitment to VMware, whether he was going to invest in innovation, whether he was going to stay with VMware for the long-haul. And we rolled out our vision, our strategy, but customers were like, "Prove it. Show us that you're actually going to do it." And maybe seven months after that, VCF 9.0 came out. And I think customers were pleasantly surprised that we not only kept the promise, Hock actually invested a lot because the number of innovations in that release, it's close to like 500 different innovations. And so, customers are really blown away by what they're seeing actually in the box. And so, that's why you see so much excitement and all the discussions have now shifted to, "How do we adopt?" And what surprised me a lot is there is a whole bunch of customers here who have already adopted and they're talking about what they're seeing in the product, they have rolled it out, they have done it without any issues. And we are spending a lot of time with our partners, so that we can scale the adoption. So, that's where our energy is going.

>> Krish, I want to ask you, because it's been coming up on theCUBE, we've been very complimentary and we point out some areas we're watching. Obviously, the business model, the success. Congratulations, the business is working great. When you're transitioning, you're now in that phase where, okay, you're starting to get escape velocity, the first phase, "Oh, what's going to happen?" A little maybe cognitive dissonance around, "Did I buy the right car?" That kind of thing. But we're looking at two metrics, I want to get your reaction to that. One is customer adoption and seeing two areas, product fit, what's coming out on the product side? And then, certifications, what's happening over in the expert labs? Because those are two tell signs. One is the user, the operating side of it, who's actually getting their hands dirty? And two, the product side because it's now a product-led offering. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree with those metrics and how would you comment you feel you are doing in that area?

Krish Prasad

>> Yeah, we are doing really well. So, when we started, our thinking was that the cloud model was going to be adopted faster by all the larger companies. They obviously want to deploy a cloud and do a hybrid model with the public cloud. But what we are seeing is that in addition to the large customers, our medium and smaller customers are, in fact, in a strange way, moving much faster in deploying the cloud. We had one of our customers, insurance company, on stage, Grinnell Insurance. They're a smaller company. They were the first ones to actually deploy VCF 9.0 and they deployed the entire platform and they have delivered a full private cloud to their end users. So, what we are seeing is that customers really want the cloud-operating model. Whether we like it or not, the public clouds have established that as the model, okay? Now, it's a question of whether it should be somewhere else or in your data center or both.

>> Adam, just basically distributed computing's happening on a global scale.

Adam Little

>> Yeah.

>> So, Adam, you were on theCUBE last year. We talked about what you guys are doing. You guys have been standardizing your infrastructure, you've been cloud-like delivery on-prem, so you're already been going down this road?

Adam Little

>> Yeah.

>> Okay. Now, VCF 9.0 comes out. What's your take on it? Obviously, you want to have people using the product. Do you want to have better product features? What's your assessment?

Adam Little

>> Yeah, I think to Krish's point, it's kind of the same. You may see some small and medium-sized customers that are ready for that. They want to make that jump. They want have that level of service delivery. People want it to be simple, The same way the cloud is complex yet simple, simple delivery. And I think there's a lot of customers that, for us at least, we were deciding, "Hey, where are we at in our journey? Are we ready to make that jump?" There's been some growing pains in previous VCF versions and stuff like that. When we looked at 9.0 and we said, "Hey, this looks really polished. This is a premium release. Everything we're hearing is in the product, is in the product." For us, it was like, "Okay, now's the time. It's time for our business to make that jump." And then, we also decided that we would do our deployment, at least greenfield, alongside our existing equipment. We have a lot of VxRail, which was co-designed with VMware. So, I think just finding that path for us onto that platform to consume those pieces has been super helpful.

>> So, not a major shift for you guys in your journey?

Adam Little

>> Yeah, I think we were already used to that style. Our team already has used VMware for decades, so that's what they're comfortable with. We already leverage a bunch of VSAM. I think one of the things you were bringing up earlier was really interesting was some customers say, "Hey, everybody's talking about AI. How do I start with AI? I'm a manufacturing customer, I have really important supply chain data," or whatever that might be, "I don't want to put that in someone's public cloud. That should really run in your own data center." But then they go, "Well, where do I start? Is that bare metal AI? What GPUs do I need? What platform do I use?" Well, if you have a cloud-delivery platform on-prem deployed, follow the blueprint to deploy it and get started with it. So, I think for a lot of those small and medium customers, they don't have a whole team to throw at discovery and how we plan that out, where we can lean on a partner to say, "You guys know how to do that on your private cloud. How can we follow that blueprint?"

>> Yeah, it's not the classic IT playbook, just stack and rack a bunch of GPUs. Well, many reasons why, power and other things, but you can do it now and the cost of doing that could be leveraged with the cloud operate model.

Adam Little

>> Absolutely.

>> From the cost perspective, it's like, "Hey, we know how to do this."

Adam Little

>> And I think you're not starting from square one trying to build that plan. It is, here's a model to follow and then find those use cases for your business where you want to tackle AI initiatives.

>> All right. so you've mentioned AI. So, let's jump into... I love the AI factory conversation. Manufacturing is a great use case, as well as healthcare and some of the life sciences. But are you using AI to make better beer or better operations, or does that go hand in hand? Share what you're working on.

Adam Little

>> Yeah, I think a little bit of all of those things I'll share from a customer side, something that I hear from a lot of folks is, "My CEO or my leadership team says AI. We got to do AI. They read in it a magazine. We got to start working on AI." One of the challenges I see is a lot of customers will go, "Hey, here's this problem. We've never been able to solve it as humans. Let's throw it at AI." You're going to have a bad time with that, right? You've got to pick an area of your business where you have good, clean data to have AI help you make better decisions with that, to help you find areas of your business where you happen to not find those opportunities. So, I think, for us, in a manufacturing space, we do have a lot of telemetry. We were doing IoT before anyone called it IoT, so we have really good supply chain data, so that's an opportunity. But then on the sales side, we also have really good sales data of what product mix sells well in certain areas, so that's an opportunity, right? But that'd be my best advice to any customer out there that's looking to start with AI is pick an area where you know you're going to have a good solve and a good return to prove to business-

>> Yeah, last time you were on, edge was a huge part of it because you mentioned the sales data, knowing what the locations are. How has your view changed on how the edge is evolving with some of the things you're seeing? And connect the dots for us, what you're thinking is, because I would imagine that it's going to get smarter and look a lot different operationally?

Adam Little

>> Yes. I think for me an example of what would be good with an edge AI use case is empowering our operators to make some of those decisions that were manual with a recommendation engine alongside of it of saying, "Hey, looking at the data on the last three or four times you've made this beer or you've gone from that beer to this product, you should look at this," or, "you should monitor this pH level," or, "pitch yeast earlier," something like that, right? Start with a recommendation engine, not the AI doing it for you because that's a better buy-in from your folks of, "Hey, this is not trying to replace me, it's trying to work alongside me, agentic AI." That can help drive buy-in with the business. But I think for us edge use cases are not going away. We're going to have more and more manufacturing facilities where we're starting to be like, "Okay, if we can follow a cloud delivery model on-prem, then we don't need resources at that site." We want that compute and those resources there, so those line operators can make real-time decisions, but we want make it similar enough that we can manage it remotely.

>> I mean, I'm assuming you're going to have consumer data coming in.

Rebecca Knight

>> I want to get into what you were talking about earlier with the getting buy-in from your employees, because as you said, your management team is sitting around reading magazines saying, "Okay, we got to get on this thing." And the worker day folks are saying, "Is this going to replace me?" So, how do you go about getting buy-in? And as you said, saying, "This is here to help you do your job. This is additive for you, not meaning you're going to be out of a job soon"?

Adam Little

>> Right. Yeah, I mean I think that maybe it's a little bit easier for our line of business because we are very highly automated, so it's just explaining to them that it's a tool that's enabling them to make better decisions. We're still trusting them to make the decision. And also, everyone needs to keep in mind that when you're starting with AI, it's going to get stuff wrong. It does need to be checked, it needs to be calibrated. You need to make sure you have the right inputs, the right outputs. So, we can't just say, "Hey, this is ready today to replace you. We need you to help us vet it and drive the adoption, so that this is giving us better data and we're making better decisions with it." So, I think if you frame it to folks on that, they're a little more apt to try it.

Krish Prasad

>> I mean, we are seeing across the board customers trying out different things in AI, and that's one reason why we decided to put AI Foundation inside VCF. So, now all customers can get it when they buy VCF. They don't need to come back and buy a special add-on for AI because everybody is trying out different things and in trying to be thoughtful, like these guys. So, a lot of AI work is happening-

>> So, Krish, I have to ask you because what he's getting down is the future for all your customers when they go here, when they get to the VCF 9.0, have cloud delivery, all kinds of new options open up. He's talking about new things he's going to innovate with. All the customers have the same view. AI factories, simulations, new use case, that puts a lot of pressure on your team. On the product side, how do you think about that? How do you get the requirements? Of course, platforms should be enabling, so you don't have to do a lot much work. I mean build every feature, but you should enable... Is there a common pattern in all this? Because at the end of the day, it's only going to accelerate faster.

Krish Prasad

>> Think about it this way, five years ago we started our journey with Nvidia. We started integrating Nvidia into our platform and it took two or three years for Nvidia to make changes, for us to make changes, so that the performance was there. Just like bare metal, you can run it on VCF and get the same performance. Lot of work went into it. So, that's how we do it. We look at it far enough ahead and continue to work with all the key partners. And so, in the AI space, we were ready when the gen AI hit. We didn't have to say, "Oh, now we have to work five years with Nvidia." It was already out of the box ready for our customers to use, and we'll continue to do that.

>> Adam, what's on your end? What's the big driver from product standpoint that you see as a disruptive enabler, in a good way?

Adam Little

>> Yeah, I mean I think that we talked about the cloud delivery model, but I think also there's a customer challenge of, let's say you get started with AI and you do it bare metal, this is what we brought up and heard in the keynote, what happens when that catches fire? How do you scale that up? The same way we scaled all these years with VMware, is if you're building it on a platform that scales with your business, that's just going to make sense about, "Hey, maybe we need to add some GPUs to some hosts or add something new to our cluster or a new workload domain or something like that," but there is a route to growing that. The other thing that I think is super interesting is that that level of fleet management right across the board, all the benefits you get from SDDC and all of that, the VCF tools of saying, Hey, getting even my team to shift their mindset from, oh, we need to buy new nodes for the Fort Collins cluster. Oh, we need to buy new nodes for the Asheville cluster. No, I want to come to my companies that we buy from Dell specifically and say, Hey, I need to buy 20 nodes this year and I'm going to put them where the business needs them and we're going to be ready to enable that, and that might be GPU-ready nodes, so that we can do AI and that workload domain on site at that facility. So, just changing the mindset.

>> Now, the most important question is everyone wants to know is what new beer is coming out? What's the top sellers?

Rebecca Knight

>> What is AI telling us that we want?

>> What's the zeitgeist in the beer community? What's the new thing? Is there new action happening? Give us an update on the overall, the product.

Adam Little

>> The beer landscape is largely unchanged. For better or worse, it seems like everybody's buying IPAs, that's what everyone likes. The IPA category is getting wider and wider, so there's very-near IPAs. So, for us, that's Voodoo Ranger and that full portfolio. We do make a Hardcharged Tea that's in that category, so a Twisted Tea competitor. And we're also starting with a better-for-you drink called Lightstrike, which is in a plastic bottle and it's like coconut water and lemon, lime and different flavors. So, that's very popular with younger drinkers, that they can either add more flavor or add more alcohol if they want to to those. So, we're starting to dabble a little bit outside of beer. That's where we make our money is still beer, so we're going to stay true to that. But trying different things, and I think that's important for every business is trying to evolve and try to experiment with .

>> We have a lead analyst on our team on the beer category, it's Rob Strechay. He's an IPA influencer. Rob, you're watching, we need you to weigh in on this. He's an influencer. He goes around and there's a whole beer community out there. They're all on social, so-

Adam Little

>> Awesome.

Rebecca Knight

>> I want to ask about the kinds of conversations that you're having outside of other brewers that you're meeting here at VMware Explore, in terms of how you talk about how you're using VCF 9.0 and what you are learning from them about how you use it and vice versa?

Adam Little

>> Yeah, I think what's interesting is when you have conversations, it's nice to have that about, okay, it's the same platform that works for all these different unique business cases. Obviously, for me, it's super nice to talk to other manufacturing customers and ask them how they're leveraging it, but talking to hospitals and stuff like that about how they're leveraging that to push decision making to doctors and nurses, and you never really even think about, "Okay. Yeah, of course this platform works for all those different customers." And it's really interesting to see ways they're leveraging the platform and letting it grow with their business. So, I think that that's always a fun conversation is getting into other lines of business and how best they leverage it. Because I think, for us, there's always been this route of you can go a couple different ways in most businesses. You can consolidate into one big data center or you can consolidate at the edge, where it's distributed. In manufacturing, we tend to lean towards edge and distributed, but it is interesting to hear customers, big banks in that say, "Hey, I had 40 data centers and I now have seven," that's enabled to bring that footprint down. Just to think about that and calculate how many man hours that would take to do without the right tools, it's very impressive to hear their journey and moving out of where they want to be into a model that works better for their business.

>> I mean, the technology, even Broadcom, we ran yesterday talking about the chips. Tomahawk 6 takes six devices out of the rack because of the throughput. It's just phenomenal. It's only getting better on the large clusters.

Krish Prasad

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, Krish, final question. We're at this moment where edge AI and private cloud are all converging and it feels very exciting today as I think the 1,001st first day of having ChatGPT. And as you said, you were early on the gen AI. But what excites you most about what is possible now and going forward for customers, and what you can do to enable that?

Krish Prasad

>> I mean, we are the key enabler for all the innovation that our customers do. You just heard about all the innovation that he is driving for his business. So, in a way, we are like the plumbing and we give them the easy plumbing on which they can do all their innovations. And so, we just watch the world evolve, but based on the VCF private cloud as the underpinning, and that's what excites us.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, it's great to be a plumber.

>> All right.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, Krish and Adam, thank you both so much for coming back on theCUBE a great conversation.

Krish Prasad

>> Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much.

Rebecca Knight

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