Broadcom’s Big Bet: Why VMware Cloud Foundation Is Gaining Ground | TSG Ep. 885

Hey everyone, what's the catalyst for the biggest drive towards modernization in tech? It might be Broadcom's, acquisition of VMware. You are watching Techron Gang.

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimo. Happy Tuesday. We have done, we're gonna do something we've never done before, right?

And if you could do that in your life, it's always nice. I think we're gonna do a special edition of our Textron Gang. And, um, in this edition, rather than doing our normal three sort of segments, we're going to take our whole gang, uh, episode and we're going to dedicate it to one subject.

And I, I, we're trying it out. We hope you're gonna like it. Let me, I'll give you the subject off the top.

It's, as I said in the beginning, it, the largest drive or the biggest catalyst for the modernization that we've seen may in fact have been Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. Prove me right or wrong. Let me introduce you to our gang who's gonna discuss this with us today.

Uh, some of them you are familiar, some not so familiar. Let me go to the familiar folks first. We've got, you know, from Tech Field Day, he actually knows a thing or two about this stuff.

Uh, Steven Foskett. Hey, Steven, how are you? Very good.

It's nice to be here. And, um, also, of course, uh, yeah, nice to be working with Broadcom on the launch of VMware VCF nine, uh, or at least sharing info about it. Absolutely.

Also joining us, uh, she's the CEO of Deploy hub and knows a thing or two about modernization as well as open source, our friend Tracy Reagan. Hey, Tracy. Hey Alan.

And thanks for inviting me to this special edition of the Text on Gang. Getting to spend time on one topic, like 30 minutes is awesome. Yeah, Yeah.

Better than the usual 10 or 15 we usually do. That's but not, well not last, but, and certainly not least either. Our Chief Content Officer, Mike Ard.

Hey, Mike, welcome. Happy to be here, as always. And yeah, I've been hanging around VMware for three decades now.

So here we go again. Here we go again. And then our very special guest today, I want to introduce you to, and I hope I get her name right, I apologize in advance, Sabina Anya.

Sabina is Senior Technology product Lead at VMware Cloud Foundation. Sabina, welcome to Techron Gang. Hey, thank you.

As speaking of viewing something new. Here's my new thing for, for at least this week, so thanks for having me. Looking forward.

Absolutely. This conversation. Hey, you never know.

You may like it so much. You want to come back again and again. Hey, a good time.

Alright. Um, Sabina, since you're the new person on the block, let's hear a little bit about your role in, you know, your technology product lead at VMware, uh, for cloud, for VMware Cloud Foundation. What do you, what exactly does that mean?

Uh, you know, it's, it's interesting you ask because I think it's, uh, the role is very much a, a product of all of the change that we've seen as a result of the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. And, um, for, for about, I don't, I say seven or eight years now, we had this product called VMware Cloud Foundation. And if, you know, it says version one, oh, well, things were a lot different back then.

But basically we had these roles as either pre-sale specialists and basically folks that were looking at the platform as a whole, kind of figuring out kind of how does it integrate together? How, how do we go to market as one platform. Now, back in the days of VMware, this was one of, I wanna say, many, many roles we had in, in the environment.

And, you know, you're kind of competing with vSphere, you're competing with the likes of vs a. You can imagine that the y light was very, very narrow. Uh, I've worked with VMware for about five years now, and it basically went from one of hundreds of roles that we had as part of VMware to one of the central roles.

I've seen my own role change in the past two years dramatically, where myself, my team, our leadership basically focuses on VCF only. Our job is to make VCF easy to adopt, is to take what our engineering team is building, what our product management team is kind of shepherding and making sure that, uh, it hits the market in the cleanest, easy to comprehend, easy to adopt, working directly with customers, getting feedback kind of way. So it's, it's very much a reflection of the times and of the change.

Excellent. Thank you. Thank you for that.

Alright, gang, let's jump into it. Mike, I said my piece, right? Yeah.

Who, who knew? 0 and, um, Broadcom and VMware before and has been making a case for an integrated platform for a while and post merger. It seems like VCF is at the core of that whole proposition.

But, uh, Sabina, what's changed on the customer side that they wanna have this conversation now where they're gonna have a single integrated platform covering compute, storage, networking, and security elements as well. It feels like something has happened on the way the customer thinks about all this stuff. And what are they telling you?

I think this is definitely a, a two part answer at the very least, where platform maturity meets market momentum. I mean, we've all, I think everybody on this call has been for about at least two decades, if not three I've heard earlier in this industry, and we've all seen the same things. I come from basically doing infrastructure at customers, and over time you saw the same points of friction, whether the year was 2005, 20, 20, 20 15, right?

You, you wanna deploy a workload, which is kind of what the businesses care about. They don't care about your network infrastructure or your virtualization engine. They care about does my app work?

Can I make money from this? Right? But a lot of what goes in the kind of the, the kitchen and deploying this was who deploys, what, what's, why the architecture of the app?

How do I put all of this together? And for the longest amount of time, it just, you know, infrastructure got bigger, but also very deeply siloed. And there was always a game of hot potato of whose fault is it if something breaks?

I used to be a network engineer, so it was absolutely always my fault no matter what, right? It's you, it doesn't matter. Storage breaks down somehow.

We haven't provisioned the VLAN correctly on the interface, you know the story, but all of these things incur delays, incur challenges, downtime that costs millions depending on the industry that you work in. And every company due to current economical times and so on. You get all of these requests for do more with less.

Like you have these teams that have been 5, 6, 7 people teams for years now, but the infrastructure has grown a hundred percent, 500%, and they're still asked to manage all of it. So at one point there was a point of convergence, how long can you go managing switch by, switch server by server, VM by VM and not think of more of an integral approach when you have like two pizza boxes and a switch. Yeah.

That kind of works to do it manually timestamp as well. So I think VMware Cloud Foundation isn't new. What we've done to make it work a lot better is you can't see the seams anymore.

It used to be that it was kind of a bundle of products and customers saw through that and they're like, well, look, we don't need five different products so that we can pretend we have a private cloud, either get it together and make it work as one platform, or we'll continue in our own way. So what changed as a result of the acquisition was basically bring the product together, have this one interface to do operations on a daily basis, have one interface to do automation. I can tell you that from customer momentum, and again, I spent a lot of time with customers.

One of the pieces of information I got recently was, you know what, we used to use your automation products, but at one point we had to work so many of the flows ourselves and spend so much time trying to understand it that we figured that's your job. You fix the platform and we'll just deploy on top of it. 0 with any number of scripts and so on, with a more mature, solid product.

Adoption is so critical. Adoption is so critical in all in any cloud modernization that you're looking at. You know, whether it be like Linux and Kubernetes or you know, HPC systems, the adoption is the problem.

And Sabina, you said something very important. Most application teams are less than 10 people and they're asked to be doing so much. You know, we, you know, we think about an application team of seven or 10 programmers, and they're coding out there, they're generating code, not doing any work at all.

But that's not true. They're managing so many pieces. And the adoption is the one thing I hear the biggest complaint from customers in terms of cloud modernization is the difficulty to implement a high performance computing system because these teams have so much on their plate that a centralized dashboard, a centralized solution, is more important to them than building their own.

So adoption and is really is the key to success in this area. No, and I, I 100% agree because again, you you sit on too much, too much software, it becomes shelfware and then each customer kind of gets challenged with this, how can I make best use of what I have? And the first temptation is a little bit like how public cloud used to be, right?

The, the reason why public cloud got so popular is was it was easy to adopt. The friction was minimal, the credit card swipe was easy. And then at one point it kind of blew out of proportion and, uh, it went beyond the credit card swipe and well into the millions.

But it also started creating certain challenges, budgets, uh, oversight, sovereignty, security, right? So I do think that adoption is one of the s strong, strongest points we can offer going forward. Like, okay, you have all of this under the hood, think about how you can use it best.

So in my mind though, one of the, the nice things about Cloud Foundation nine I know is, um, the idea of multi-cloud, right? So I, I will tell you, I I was around when the cloud first kind of came out and, you know, I looked at it kind of skeptically and I always felt that we weren't gonna move everything to the cloud, right? There'd be some stuff in public cloud and some stuff you wanna call it private cloud, you wanna call it your server closet, your data center, I don't care.

Some would be up in the public cloud, some not. I didn't see where I'd be keeping some on AWS and some on Google and some on Microsoft and maybe some Oracle or what have you. And then some in my own private stuff as well.

And, and that to me, that, that always kind of surprised me that it, it caught on that multi-cloud sort of view of things. But again, a small team having to manage these platforms, the idea of having to manage five different platforms, four or five different platforms is, is scary. I mean, it's downright, you know, scary, wasteful, you know, to me, one of the nice things here about Cloud Foundation is I need to go deep on Cloud Foundation.

What runs underneath it is, is a lot less important to me than what runs on top of it. And I think that is a huge piece of this. Steven, I see you wanna say something?

Yeah. And, and I think that, that you're really onto it there. And I think that the, a lot of people listening to this, you know, to be honest, are gonna be saying, yeah, yeah, I've heard that before.

That's exactly what I've heard from literally every company modernization. Yeah. Whatever.

But the thing about VMware as a product is that VMware is the platform of choice for basically the, the, the big bulk of big IT shops out there. And VMware Yes. Has been working on various different ways of helping customers to modernize their platform for many years.

And yes, this is the latest in a series of such products. I mean, it's called vSphere nine. Um, you know, they, they did skip a couple numbers, but they certainly didn't skip a lot of learning in terms of, um, getting up to speed with how to do this thing, right?

What I wanted to point out is that throughout when we've been looking at this, this release and when we've been hearing about it, um, as part of our textron our tech field day events, what we are hearing is a very practical and pragmatic approach. It's, it's all well and good to say rewrite everything to modernize it, but nobody's gonna do that. It's also all well and good to say lift and shift and call it a day.

But that's not modernization either. What I hear from Broadcom with the VCF nine release is basically for the biggest companies with the biggest needs, here's a really practical framework that you can deploy your applications on that achieves the goals of cloud. Even if, you know, it doesn't have the cloud weenies out there saying, you know, oh, you know this and this and that.

You know, I mean, it, it's, it's practical. It's like, let's do the thing. And, and that, that has extended even to the point where some of the features have been reduced, some of the capabilities have been kind of refactored and refocused to make things kind of work the way, um, come operators want the cloud to work as opposed to sort of meet the needs of those people who are, have their head in the clouds and, and you the cloud purists.

Mm-hmm. I love point something to Steven's point about that. Um, one of the things also about VCF nine is interesting is the way you approach Kubernetes.

And if I went back in time, there was everybody thought Kubernetes would be the death of VMware. And if I look at it now to the modernization point, the Kubernetes cluster is embedded in the virtual machine. And I use the same core management infrastructure to manage that alongside all my legacy monolithic stuff.

Um, as I kind of think that whole thing through, are you seeing more work cloud native workloads starting to show up on BCF nine and has that whole motion of, uh, monoliths and microservices just meld it together into one management motion? You know what's interesting? If, if you look at, um, kinda what the desire for Cloud Foundation was for the longest time, it was basically a platform ready for anything.

Because un unless you're a a day old startup that's kind of starting some crazy AI, whatever, ML based, you're gonna have a mix of legacy and new applications. There's any number of large enterprises that say the magical words like fort Tram based applications, which, you know, hearkens back all the way to the seventies. If you think about it.

And you still need to support things like mainframes. You still need to support things that were written. Like there are pieces of code in there that are, you know, quite from a different decade at this point, but not from a different millennia, right?

So you need to be able to support both. You can't say we're gonna marginalize that somewhere at the edge of the data center. We're not gonna look at the energy footprint.

We're not gonna look at how we secure that because some of the most precious data in finance runs on that kind of code, for example, right? But then you have all of this newness in goodness, right? There's a lot of discussions around, um, AI being used for risk management for research and development, right?

So you, you need to bear to marry both an infrastructure that is able to carry on and, and support all these older applications. More legacy style, more monolithic first design in 1982, and also this kind of like new microservice based, lots of database interactions, very, um, storage intensive and network intensive, right? So how do you build for both?

First of all, you need a strong hardware layer to kind of support anything, but then get the software layer to be in the service of this. And that's where we accelerate because we build the features and you don't have to constantly change you, you as the vi admin, you as the infra admin. The person that used to know and love vSphere now has basically a similar interface regardless of what you want to support going forward is your beloved vSphere interface that you've known since 1998 at the end of the day.

So, I know I didn't answer your question on the repatriation, but that's kind of, I was, I was trying to go for, for Steve Steven's question from before, but for the repatriation, we've definitely seen, um, an entire trend of certain applications moving from the public cloud. Like I've mentioned AI apps, there's definitely a concern from our customers of how much does it cost as my application expands in the cloud. 'cause they're very storage hungry.

They're, they, they require a lot of cloud operations as well. And with all the cloud environments taxing you for ingers and re then it becomes a little bit more difficult to control the cost because you want your application to run properly. You're not gonna look at it and go like, we can only do this much on it.

So private cloud becomes more interesting that way. Yeah. So I feel like we gotta adjust the, the elephant in the room, right?

A lot, a lot of people when Broadcom first acquired VMware and, and you know, rumors and then the announcement of licensing changes, a lot of people were thought that was what a mistake. Everybody's gonna move, you know, each 'cause each cloud platform has their own in-house hypervisor, let's call it there, right? And a funny thing happened on the way to, uh, on, on the way to the cloud is people began to realize li licensing prices or license prices were not the most critical factor in people's decision on number one, are they moving to a public cloud or at least some, some infrastructure to a public cloud.

And number two, do they take, as you say, Sabina, that vSphere that they've been using since 1998 with them, right? And that I think is one of the big haha moments, right? That people are voting with their feet and their pocket books and their moving vans to take that vSphere with them to the cloud as well as upgrading what they're doing in the private data center right now.

Steven, I I know you follow this space really closely. It's kind of near and dear to you, but I mean, did you see that coming? You know, it, it, it's interesting because like you said, I mean, the elephant in the room here is everybody wants to, well not everybody, but there's been sort of this sentiment that, oh, this is all selfish and this is not about the customer.

But that's not what I'm seeing from my friends in the VMware side. I, I'm seeing them very much focused on their customer's needs and very much focused on what, uh, you know, like I said, what, what is a practical way to move forward here rather than what is the, um, sort of the, the, I don't know, expected, uh, you know, app modernization approach? And, and, and the point is that, like you said, Alan, and, and your recent article on text on it, this was a catalyst for a lot of companies to get moving on modernization and to get real on modernization.

And instead of sort of continually being stuck in that, you know, well, we've gotta redo everything, uh, phase or just sort of being stuck in, well, we're busy with everything else, we can't modernize right now. It was an opportunity for people to, um, I think move forward and say, you know, what makes sense? Like, like, uh, you know, what, what Sabina was just saying, what are the goals?

Like what do I want from a private cloud? Not sort of like, what does cloud, you know, with a capital C do, but what do I want? What are the essential elements that I need there?

I need flexibility. I need, you know, the ability to, to grow and to contract and to, to work in multiple areas, but also restrict from working in certain places. You know, geographically, I need to have the ability to be much more dynamic and programmatic and software defined in how, uh, infrastructure is deployed.

But I don't wanna just set everything on automatic and let it roll. I need to have this be something that is modern and yet managed. And, and I think that that's the flavor that's coming through with this release.

And, and frankly, it's maybe the flavor that was missing from, you know, some previous solutions and also some previous solutions from a lot of different companies. And in this space, which I think focused too much on modernization. And, you know, we have to look at who the customer is really, you know, we, when we do these text on gigs, we're always talking about the newest technology.

Um, all the, the cool stuff that's coming out from, as Sabina put it, startups, but who's really doing the hard work. If we look at the public sector, if we look at the financial sector, we look, look at, uh, telecoms, there is a huge, um, that that is, that is the core of, of software to be quite honest. It is where software is, and Broadcom is always service that, that those sectors, and those are the sectors that tend to be more careful, more, um, more risk averse and maybe running to the cloud wasn't their first, um, goal.

Uh, but they're, they're now getting there. And to be able to do it safely within the construct, the, the kind of the constructs that they need to, to maintain in terms of how their software is built, how secure it has to be, and who's, who's there, who's using it, which is an important aspect of this conversation. They needed a better way to manage the ability to move to the cloud.

And VM started that, and that's where we started talking about high performance computing, but they couldn't get there that fast because of all the things we've just talked about. It is really hard to manage these environments really hard. So you get down to that one dashboard and you get to a place where you can actually have, you know, multi-vendor, if, as, as Alan talked about, it makes it a reality for a public sector or a high risk of financial application that they're not gonna break into microservices in the next six months.

So this is why I think that it is a catalyst because it makes it a reality for these types of applications and the, in the, not only the, the developers, but making sure the end users are protected as well. That's the goal. And, you know, you know, this new platform and what the direction Broadcom is taken, uh, in, in the, in VMware is making it real.

Mm-hmm. Yep. So Being, I feel like AI was gonna force the issue anyway, because if I look at the way it is gonna evolve, I'm gonna see a bunch of AI agents and they'll be handling networking, task storage, compute, whatever it is, but it will flatten the IT organization anyway.

So, um, isn't this, at least to me, it feels like the natural progression of things as we were gonna see this consolidation anyway, I 100% agree where in a lot of, uh, private equity, um, groups, these conversations are basically old. So there was a need for something like this for 10 years, almost like something that's a platform wide spans, and the future is in the intelligence of it, the right now or for actually a reasonable amount of time. You know, you, you were stuck with doing things like troubleshooting, particularly manually, right?

You have to connect the dots, you have to know where to go into the platform to get the information. So a lot of the, um, what, what, what made an S-M-E-A-A subject matter expert incredibly important is when they had like that quick thought about where do I need to look? What do I need to configure?

What are all the best practices? But what makes infrastructure incredibly lean is when you can move a little bit past the kind of like nitty gritty day-to-day linking, you know, errors on an interface and more into what am I trying to achieve here? How can we get more efficient?

And then you can do a more agent way of running infrastructure. Like you're, you're asking your agent, Hey, give me the outputs on this interface. What does this mean?

How should I go about it? And then you get a bunch of choices on how to best manage and elevate your infrastructure. So we're seeing like the, but the first thing that you need to have is a continuous infrastructure.

You can't do this when you're running 160 products to run basic application infrastructure. It's, it's just too hard. And linking all of that manually, like we've seen customers try and the the biggest challenge is it's all constantly moving.

So you're basically now stuck with trying to automate outputs between your different environments and, uh, software stacks to manage it. Like just, just log management. And I, you know, I, I can hear any number of my engineering peers go, like, don't start with log management and kind of prioritizing between all of the, um, p one alerts and so on.

And is this an important log? Just all of this is so incredibly hard and massive infrastructure that there is an absolute need for one, a platform that's kind of all encompassing, and two, something that helps you get insights from it. 'cause one of the things we've heard from customers is this is changing so quickly, right?

VCF is a, is a whole, it's an opportunity and a challenge at the same time because I'm used to my vCenter environment, and this is just so much more, and we've put a lot of tools at the disposal of our, of our customers, like, Hey, here's how you learn, here's how you align with your business priorities. But that still requires a bit of a mental change of thinking, how do we operate going forward? What is the best way?

How can I be better and more efficient? And for an infra admin, that should 100% be an opportunity to kind of be with the next thing. Yeah, I, I agree.

You know what, and that's a actually a great segue, Sabina. It's a day of doing things first, you know, new, new things. So in addition to this special edition of Techstrong Gang, we have, it's kind of a first a, a combined tech field day tech strong sort of joint production.

Spike Lee's not involved, but it is a joint production of, uh, of a Broadcom virtual event. Steven, you probably know the name of it better than me. I, can I pass this over to you?

Sure, you can, Alan, thank you very much. Yeah. So we're gonna be doing, as you said, a uh, virtual Tech Field Day event.

This is basically Tech Field day, except that rather than using the Standard Tech Field day scenario where we're basically presenting in the room kind of behind closed doors, we're actually gonna be live streaming it right here on Techstrong. So we're gonna be using the Textron virtual event platform, uh, which you can register for, you can join in. Uh, we're gonna have a day basically of deep dives into various technical aspects of VMware's Cloud Foundation as part of what we're calling a, a VMware Cloud Foundation, VCF nine Showcase, uh, focused on the modern private cloud.

So that is something that I've been looking forward to doing for quite a long time. You've seen me here on the On Techstrong Gang. You've heard me talk about Tech Field Day.

I've really wanted to try to do, um, like a mashup of Tech Field Day and Techstrong, and that's exactly what we're doing. So, so check it out on, on July 29th. Yeah, You can get to it, by the way.

com, it's the first one on there. You can click on it, register, and as I said, all the, the full day, and I forget there's five or six different sections, is Sessions, isn't, there's even, are all available streaming one after the next. They'll be on demand as well.

If you can't make it on July 29th, it will be a, uh, available for a few days after, and then eventually it will be available on the Tech Field Day YouTube channel, on the Tech Trunk, do TV network, uh, stations and so forth. But, uh, it is a virtual event, and I believe Steven, that some of the, uh, VMware Broadcom presenters will be live that day to answer questions and interact with the audience, which is always nice, right? We're gonna interact with a, a real not studio audience, but a real live audience.

Yeah. And that's what I've really always wanted to try to do with Tech Field Days. Somehow give the audience, the people who are watching these videos, the ability to, to ask a question and to be part of it.

Now, the delegate panel, that's their job. They sort of stand in for those, for that audience. But in this case, as you said, they're actually going to be, um, made available.

So a lot of the presenters from, uh, that, uh, from those presentation sessions, including also some of the delegates as well, will be available to, uh, ask questions and answer questions and basically have discussions with the audience live. Uh, we're, we're trying this out. Uh, I can't wait to see, uh, if this becomes a New Tech Field Day gig, a new Tech Field Day Tech strong, uh, let's call it Techstrong Field Day.

How about that? I'm good with it. I, I like the joint production.

I feel like Spike Lee, I should be front row at a Knicks game or something. com, and you could register right from there. We're about outta time on this special edition of the Gang, though.

Sabina, I wanna thank you for coming on here into the Lion's den and joining us, so to speak. But you're now an official gang member, and you have an invitation anytime you'd like to come back. And we, we talk about this kind of stuff pretty often.

So we'd love to have you on here. Just come on down. Um, Mike, Tracy, Steven, thank you for joining.

Thank you for watching us here on Textron Gang today. As you know, after this, we'll go back to our Textron TV schedule for the rest of your Tuesday. Enjoy it.

But, uh, we hope to see you on the 29th. If, if you've used VMware, you, you think about thinking about using VMware. You're just thinking about modernization, moving from pri private to public cloud, or upgrading your private cloud.

There's a lot you can learn on this Tech Field Day virtual event. Check it out. But until tomorrow, this is Alan Shimel.

On behalf of Techron Group, have a great day.