LAS VEGAS – Broadcom CEO Hock Tan took a much more subdued approach to his opening keynote at this year’s VMware Explore event in Las Vegas compared to last year’s event, but still managed to squeeze in a dig at VMware's inadequacies prior to the Broadcom acquisition and reinforce the private cloud-focused superiority of VMware’s latest Cloud Foundation (VCF) update.

Tan kicked off his approximately seven-minute speech by sharply pointing to VMware’s inability prior to being acquired by Broadcom to focus on what was important, which was to the detriment of the old VMware and its customers.

“You want to invest in private cloud, but the challenge we always had is VMware innovated for years, but it never truly integrated the building blocks of cloud,” Tan said.

This notion echoed what Tan said during last year’s keynote, when, during his first speech at the event following Broadcom’s purchase, the executive emphasized that things would be different for VMware going forward.

“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 last year, before adding, “We're not here to show you bright shiny objects, and talking of bright shiny objects.”

Tan this year instead focused on what VMware recently unleashed with its VCF 9.0 update. That platform was commercially launched in mid-June, ripe with more than 100 updates or new features that, while perhaps not shiny, had a throughline of making the deployment, management, and operations of multicloud environments easier for enterprise customers, especially those that favor private cloud.

Tan summed up that launch as VMware “just assembling what we've heard from you.”

“But now, here's the good news, since the acquisition two years ago, we’ve rolled up our sleeves, did the tough engineering work, and as a result, today is VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0,” Tan said. “A real software-defined platform to run all of your application workloads with complete compute, networking, and storage tightly integrated. This is what you asked for.”

Tan then boasted that this delivery was done through a “single SKU, we made it plug-and-play.”

That delivery method, which also runs through VMware’s new licensing model, has generated consternation from some customers that viewed this simplistic approach as a jolt from VMware’s previous flexibility.

VMware has walked a tightrope through this change, with results showing overall financial success. Tan, during Broadcom’s most recent earnings call, said the vendor had converted more than 87% of VMware’s 10,000 largest customers to the new subscription pricing model by the end of its fiscal second quarter of 2025.

Cloud performance claims, part deux

Tan quickly pivoted his latest speech to touting the performance benefits of VCF 9.0, stating that “private cloud now outperforms public cloud.”

This claim builds on Tan’s focal point from last year’s speech, when he targeted most of his time on stage 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 last year. “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.”

Reduced chaffing

However, Tan this year did concede that while VCF 9.0 “works like a dream … deploying it into your organization may not be easy. I run an organization myself. I feel your pain,” that segued into what he views as three reasons why taking on that pain is worth the effort.

First, Tan pointed to VCF 9.0 allowing organizations to unleash their developers to create new applications that can run in modern infrastructure architectures without putting the overall organization at risk.

“Your job is to put guardrails in place, and with VCF 9.0, we run containers as seamlessly as we run virtual machines,” Tan said. “You no longer need two separate, different platforms. We're giving you infrastructure at the speed of the developer.”

Tan also noted this approach helps break down internal data and application silos within an organization. This allows for the faster development of applications that can then more quickly be put into production.

“It's an accelerated path to production for your apps,” Tan said, adding, “It's more than just nice to have, it's critical for all of us.”

VMware updated its push in this direction with a host of new cloud-native updates to its Tanzu platform-as-a-service (PaaS) service and expanded work with cloud operating system provider Canonical.

Tan’s second point was around security, which can often be compromised when speed is prioritized. VCF tackles this by integrating more security tools, including new ones announced this week.

“You no longer need a bunch of agents, additional security tools; it's all built in,” Tan said.

Tan’s concluding point, which he gamely labeled as “probably [the] most important point of friction,” harkened back to his public-cloud jab by claiming people can’t get rid of their legacy infrastructure, and “you’re afraid to move forward.”

“How do you let go of your IT past so you can build for the future?” Tan teased. “Well, I can tell you for sure the answer is not to run straight to public cloud as you did five, 10 years ago.”