Broadcom CEO Hock Tan metaphorically completed the takeover of VMware at this week’s VMware Explore event, taking the keynote stage to tout Broadcom’s progress in integrating VMware since the deal closed 9 months ago and claiming VMware’s future is in private cloud and artificial intelligence (AI).

Tan’s first round of business was to state in no uncertain terms that VMware was now a business and not whatever it was before that allowed it to grow into something Broadcom needed to spend nearly $70 billion to acquire.

“You're going to see a change here at Explore this year, sorry, … because we are serious businesspeople. So are you. We are all about business at Broadcom, and we're here to help you run your business more effectively,” Tan proclaimed, before adding, “we're not here to show you bright shiny objects, and talking of bright shiny objects.”

As such, Tan targeted most of his talk toward touting the complexity and challenges VMware customers have been dealing with over the past decade tied to the increased use of the public cloud.

“Ten years ago, your CEO, your board of directors, fell in love with the promise of public cloud, and they drove you to public cloud,” Tan said. “Because of this, I see you're all now suffering from PTSD.”

Tan linked that post-traumatic stress disorder to organizations needing to now deal with the cost challenges and complexity embedded in public cloud deployments.

“Public cloud is much more expensive, more so than you can ever expect,” Tan said. “Complexity is another platform, is another extra layer for you to manage, and in compliance – if you have regulatory policy requirements – it's more complex, it's more expensive.”

That complexity is linked to legacy public cloud infrastructure constructs that allowed enterprises to select best-of-breed platforms for specific needs but has left enterprises in many cases unable to link those resources together.

“Just look behind the curtains in your environment, which is why in the first place you moved to public cloud, there's plenty of room for improvement,” Tan said. “You inherited legacy of data centers, which has created best-of-breed in compute, in storage, in networking. You're very siloed. You are so screwed because silos don't work well together and it's painful for you to deliver services to your internal customers. When something breaks, as it often does, everybody is pointing finger at each other. Makes you less resilient. Days to find root causes. You want to deploy a new application, you need to write a ticket. You need to write a ticket to your IT department and you might just get that virtual machine two months later.”

Expense has been an apex point for Broadcom since it closed on the VMware acquisition. Analysts have repeatedly talked about how Broadcom’s pricing and licensing adjustments to VMware’s services have resulted in significant cost increases for long-standing customers, which has many of those enterprises looking for alternatives.

Broadcom has itself repeatedly countered that narrative, noting the changes have proven to be lucrative for both VMware and its enterprise customers. However, Broadcom has also shown pricing flexibility with some of VMware larger customers.

Tan told investors during the vendor’s most recent earnings call that it has signed up “close to 3,000 of our largest 10,000 customers” to VMware’s new subscription licensing model. He added that “each of these customers typically sign up to a multi-year contract,” which when spread across an annualized booking value increased from $1.2 billion during the first quarter of this year to $1.9 billion in its latest Q2.

“We’re making good progress,” Tan said of its move to sign legacy VMware customers to the new licensing model. “The journey is not over, by any means, but it’s very much to expectation moving to subscription.”

Broadcom's VCF updates … with AI!

Broadcom’s key to that subscription push – and to ease public cloud complexity and cost – is VMware’s newly updated Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform that has become central to Broadcom’s VMware efforts.

The platform this week received a rash of updates tied to making it a more robust central management platform for controlling enterprise infrastructure. This includes a self-service cloud portal with more insights and user interface to ease management; updates to import and storage management; and integration of VMware’s Private AI Foundation work with Nvidia to help with security management.

VMware initially unveiled its Private AI Foundation platform at last year’s Explore event. It’s designed to improve privacy, choice, performance, data center scaling, and cost by accelerating storage, networking, deployment, and time-to-value for enterprises.

That platform hit general availability earlier this year, and this week gained a model store manager that allows enterprises to download and configure models from the public internet.

Paul Turner, VP of products for VCF, explained during a press briefing that this curates the models and provides access control to those models “and it makes sure that nobody’s using just general purpose” large language models (LLMs) “that you don’t want to support.”

“Because, out there on the internet, you don’t know the provenance of that LLM and where it’s coming from, so this gives you a way to manage those LLMs across your user base so that you can truly let them turn on their [generative AI] innovation and run against the” platform, Turner said.

Broadcom this week also added support for Intel’s Gaudi 2 AI Accelerators to further expand silicon options.

Those VCF platform updates are also providing a broader support base for VMware’s cloud-native Tanzu platform that itself gained new features for its “10” iteration. Those Tanzu enhancements include support for VMware’s various AI products; an application-centric layer to make it easier to manage deployments; and greater support for air-gapped, off-network private cloud environments.

Paul Nashawaty, lead principal analyst at The Futurum Group, noted in a report that the Tanzu 10 updates does provide that platform with a competitive advantage over similar cloud-native platforms from rivals like Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) “due to its deep integration with the VMware ecosystem. This integration can provide organizations with a smoother transition to cloud-native architectures, especially for those already using VMware products.”