Broadcom injected new generative artificial intelligence (AI) (generative artificial intelligence (genAI)) capabilities into its VMware Tanzu Platform, highlighting ongoing support from Broadcom for some of VMware’s legacy platforms.
The big update has Tanzu now supporting Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementation to connect enterprise data and systems. This supports Tanzu customers in building AI and agentic applications as part of agentic workflows.
Broadcom is also making available the MCP Java SDK within the Spring framework community to support enterprise adoption of agentic development.
Purnima Padmanabhan, GM for Tanzu, explained that these updates can lower the barrier of entry for developers and allow users to more quickly run their applications with AI integration “while maintaining complete security and lower down time.”
“Even though it's more advanced, it's actually easier to adopt because I don't have to have skill sets in my developers to muck around with YAML files and configurations. I don't have to have people know and spell the various projects in Kubernetes like service mesh or what is your service discovery,” Padmanabhan said.
Padmanabhan also noted that the updated Tanzu furthers the platform’s place as a “true” platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and its positioning against rivals.
“Even in Red Hat, you still have to go into the configuration files,” Padmanabhan said. “Here, what you're seeing is just focus on your application code and all the integration. I know it's a boring way to say, but truly it's an AI integration platform or an integration platform. You just write your code and all the integration gets taken care of. And that value proposition is definitely very powerful and unique to us.”
That Red Hat digs remains important as the rival has a keen eye on stealing away potentially disgruntled Tanzu customers.
Tanzu is not Kubernetes, but Broadcom remains a K8s fan Maybe more importantly, the latest Tanzu updates highlight Broadcom’s ongoing interest in supporting one of the legacy VMware platforms.
Tanzu is Broadcom’s pre-engineered PaaS designed to run on top of its halo VMware Cloud Platform (VCP) or any infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. It stands apart from the VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS), which is a Kubernetes runtime and orchestration service that is included in VCF.
Broadcom has been steadily updating Tanzu since it closed on the VMware acquisition, including enhancements announced at its Explore Barcelona event last year. However, Broadcom management has been more vocal in touting the benefits of its halo VCF and vSphere offerings, which have overshadowed Tanzu.
Padmanabhan, during a press pre-briefing for the Explore Barcelona event, towed that company line while touting Tanzu’s benefits.
“VCF and Tanzu platform are like peanut butter and jelly, because when you have a strong private cloud with VCF, and since we are all within the same organization, very, very tight integrations,” Padmanabhan said. “What you will see is, if you are on private cloud … don’t go for a bag of parts. Take VCF, do Tanzu platform and you have the full stack for application, for data, for any packages, for security, for operations, everything fully included, and that is the power.”
As part of the latest updates, Padmanabhan said that around 60% of current Tanzu customers “run on public cloud or run on a combination of private and public cloud.”
“We are saying infrastructure is commodity for us from a Tanzu perspective,” Padmanabhan said. “Now, of course, when we are with VCF we do tight integration into vSphere and NSX, but we also have great integrations into the all the other cloud providers.”
Padmanabhan in her previous blog post last year did hint at ongoing Tanzu uncertainty, noting 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.” The executive furthered this distancing as part of the latest Tanzu update.
“We have disassociated ourselves from Kubernetes, and what that means is Kubernetes for us has become commodity like IaaS,” Padmanabhan said. “So where you get your Kubernetes or what is your Kubernetes runtime is immaterial. You have [Amazon Web Services], [Google Cloud Platform], Azure, and now in vSphere we have embedded Kubernetes. So, the Kubernetes runtime is not Tanzu. Kubernetes infra management is also not Tanzu, cluster management, and so on, because we are not about the infrastructure.”
Despite the Tanzu march away from Kubernetes, Broadcom remains big on the open-source orchestration platform.
Prashanth Shenoy, VP of cloud platform, infrastructure, and solutions marketing at Broadcom, recently talked about updates to VKS. Shenoy explained that most of its VCF customers were leveraging the VKS 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.
Shenoy also noted 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.”