LAS VEGAS – Purnima Padmanabhan, VP and GM of Broadcom’s Tanzu Division, understood the need for that group to take a compartmentalized back seat to VMware’s halo Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform and private cloud during this week’s VMware Explore event, but that doesn’t mean Padmanabhan liked it.

Tanzu, which is Broadcom’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, received significant updates tied to the event, but was notable for its lack of stage presence during Broadcom CEO Hock Tan’s opening keynote. Instead, Tan spoke more broadly of VCF’s private cloud-focused container support through its VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS), which is a Kubernetes runtime and orchestration service that is included in VCF.

“Do we want more? Yes,” Padmanabhan told SDxCentral in an interview during the event, before adding that it’s also important for Broadcom to win in the private cloud space. “This show is the VCF show, and Hock’s theory is if he doesn’t win the private cloud, all the castles we build on top of private cloud will come crashing down.”

This meant Tan had to “strip out everything and made it purely a private cloud show so that he could create feedback on private cloud,” Padmanabhan added.

That left precious little room on the big stage to tout Tanzu’s latest updates, which included a host of new features and the launch of its new Data Intelligence service that is designed to help users connect their data and applications. Those built on more AI-focused enhancements added earlier this year.

Despite the under-the-radar presence, Padmanabhan said that customer advisory board members were excited about the focused nature of the updates, noting, “there was a lot of excitement on that.”

That excitement is around Tanzu’s simplicity. Padmanabhan reiterated that the platform is all about making it easier for customers to run their applications regardless of infrastructure, likening it more to Google’s Cloud Run as opposed to broader Kubernetes-based platforms like Google’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Red Hat, or VKS.

“Tanzu just provides you the app and data platform,” Padmanabhan said. “If you want PaaS or you want code-to-production, you go with the Tanzu platform.”

Private cloud and Broadcom are ideal

Despite the lack of stage presence at the event, Padmanabhan did offer that the private-cloud angle is important for Tanzu.

“For Tanzu, when I run on private cloud, I presume my workloads, they can't easily jump, but when I run Tanzu on public cloud, they can jump from mine to others,” Padmanabhan said. “So I like the private cloud.”

Padmanabhan also likes Tanzu being with Broadcom, a question broached in light of Broadcom’s recent sale of VMware’s VeloCloud SD-WAN offering to Arista and the continued tightening of VKS into VCF.

“We anchor the workloads onto the VCF platform,” Padmanabhan explained. “I don’t think honestly at this point, my opinion is a spin-off doesn’t make sense because we are a profitable, growing business that’s adding to the bottom line and that really adds a lot of value on top of VCF. I’ve got some of the largest customers running 60% of their workloads anchored by Tanzu on VCF … you don’t want to take that off and spin that off to a competitor.”