Broadcom’s heavy focus on VMware’s Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform has driven strong revenue growth, but the vendor is also seeing traction with its embedded cloud-native vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS).

Prashanth Shenoy, VP of cloud platform, infrastructure, and solutions marketing at Broadcom, explained during a press briefing ahead of the upcoming KubeCon/CloudNativeCon Europe event that most of its VCF customers were leveraging that platform to run their virtual machines (VMs) and containerized applications.

“Any customer where 50% to 60% of their workloads are VMs – and the remaining are their cloud native or container applications – they're actively moving those workloads to leverage VKS because they've already paid for that as part of the platform, so they don't need to pay another platform,” Shenoy said.

That adoption is driving a surge in new containerized workloads running on VCF, including artificial intelligence (AI)-focused applications.

“Most of the people, when they think about VMware and VCF, they think, ‘hey, there's the platform for running VMs,’” Shenoy added. “While that is true, and this still continues to be true, a whole lot of growth that we are seeing are in these modern workloads, whether they are AI workloads, whether they are modern databases, modern data services, etc., which are cloud native and containerized, they are using VCF to run their platform.”

That AI angle is important for Broadcom, which has increased its focus on using VMware to drive AI opportunities.

“As large enterprises adopt AI, they have to run their AI workloads on their [on-premises] data centers, which will include both GPU servers as well as traditional CPUs,” Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said during the vendor’s latest earnings call about the VMware Private AI Foundation platform. “And just as VCF virtualizes these traditional data centers using CPUs, VCF will also virtualize GPUs on a common platform and enable enterprises to import AI models to run their own data [on-premises].”

Broadcom claims it’s less expensive than rivals

Shenoy also noted that those containerized VCF workloads are coming from rival container-as-a-service (CaaS) platforms. The executive specifically pointing to Red Hat’s OpenShift as one of those drivers but added that customers going that route end up paying more.

Shenoy walked through an analysis of compute and cost requirements for an average customer running between 800 and 900 workloads in VMs and containers, which found a 50% cost savings for a customer relying exclusively on VKS.

“They have the flexibility and choice, but when we do the TCO analysis, it comes out more and more often that running natively using VKS, the container workloads is a lot more cost effective than having a two-platform strategy or running your containers on workload on bare metal, and that's where most of our customer conversations are,” Shenoy said.

That Red Hat comparison is significant as the IBM division has touted VMware conquest opportunities tied to Broadcom’s overhaul of VMware’s operations.

“What it’s forcing right now with the Broadcom acquisition is it’s forcing every enterprise client to make platform architecture decisions, and that’s going to be between virtualization and containerization,” IBM CFO James Kavanaugh said during an analyst conference last year, touting IBM’s consulting services, its Watson X generative artificial intelligence (genAI) platform, and Red Hat OpenShift. “That’s why clients are coming to us with extreme interest around a growth factor that I think will play out for multiple years, and we’re excited about that.”

Andrew Sullivan, senior manager for virtualization and platform tech marketing at Red Hat’s Hybrid Platform Business Unit, furthered the notion of this Broadcom-driven VMware inflection point, telling SDxCentral in an interview that this has caused a pointed reaction from the market.

“My personal, anecdotal experiences this last year has been a lot of the emotional, visceral reactions to what’s happened, and I think people are digesting that and now they’re figuring out what those next steps are and not doing so in a panicked manner,” Sullivan said. “It’s less of the ‘oh, I need to move right now,’ and more of the, ‘OK, what’s my strategy going forward and how do I want to handle virtualization? Do I want to continue to have a single vendor strategy? How do I want to diversify across multiple hypervisors?’”

Sullivan added that those questions “very much triggered an out-of-cycle reevaluation.”

“I think folks are being more honest with themselves about what they need from a virtualization platform, and really giving a deep look into, ‘this was easy before and I didn’t have to invest much time, effort, energy, into it, it did everything I need. Should I continue doing that? How do I again diversify?’”

Red Hat’s claims are similar to those of other VMware rivals that have touted their own success in stealing disgruntled VMware customers away from Broadcom. However, Shenoy’s overall message continued what has been a common theme from Broadcom executives touting VMware’s post-Broadcom purchase success.

Market confusion?

Shenoy’s statements also showed Broadcom’s continued focus outside of VMware’s flagship VCF offering and its continued refinement of those non-VCF services.

Broadcom last year migrated its long-running Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Services into VCF with the new VKS moniker. That decision caused some confusion among Tanzu users.

Purnima Padmanabnan, GM of Broadcom’s Tanzu Division, in a blog post following last year’s Broadcom Explore Europe event, noted that “one of the lessons I took from the week was that there is still confusion over the Kubernetes runtime we sell and where it sits in the VMware by Broadcom portfolio.”

“This move was very intentional as the Kubernetes runtime itself is just part of any modern cloud [infrastructure-as-a-service] and this being deeply embedded into the VCF stack means that more VCF customers will be ready to adopt advanced services offered by Tanzu sooner without struggling with integration,” Padmanabhan wrote. “Many existing Tanzu customers use other versions of the Kubernetes runtime (namely, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Multicloud) to meet specific requirements. Tanzu will continue to support these versions, but in the end, Tanzu Platform is designed to run on any [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] conformant Kubernetes runtime.”

Shenoy furthered that commitment, noting that Broadcom remains one of the top three contributors to the Kubernetes community.

“This may not be a well-known fact in the industry,” Shenoy said of that contributor commitment. “We actively drive an increase in innovation, ecosystem, and community development in the Kubernetes marketplace. This is very, very critical for us, so we are carrying that VMware heritage and pulling that into Broadcom.”