Defiant Broadcom Calls For Tech To Go Back Where It Belongs: On Premises

Broadcom has opened its VMware Explore conference in a defiant tone, declaring it now offers a superior user experience compared to public clouds.

CEO Hock Tan took the keynote stage in Las Vegas and asserted that the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite offers better security and cost management than hyperscale clouds.

“Most of you continue to be weighed down by legacy infrastructure, and you are afraid to move forward,” he said. “The answer is not to run straight to public cloud like you did 10 to 15 years ago.” He instead wants buyers to embrace Cloud Foundation “and stay on-prem.”

VP for VCF Paul Turner ended the keynote by reminding the vFaithful that, when VMware introduced server virtualization, “people thought we were crazy – why would you want to share a server?”

IT professionals, he said, understood the opportunity. VMware later introduced software-defined datacenters and again defied doubters. Turner vowed VMware will again be proven right.

The company has a plan to back the rhetoric, led by expanding VCF to include Private AI Services at no extra cost.

The AI bundle includes a model mart, agent builder, and blueprints to build AI apps. VMware previously sold it as an add-on to VCF. Now it’s part of the package, because a pillar of Broadcom’s plan to improve on public clouds is to show that private clouds offer more predictable costs. Renting cloudy AI, Broadcom suggests, will cause even bigger bill blowouts as enterprises experiment with the technology.

The company also points to the risk of allowing corporate data to become part of the training corpus AI companies create to build their models. Expanding VCF to include on-prem AI extends Broadcom’s private cloud pitch – and gives it a chance to win an emerging class of workload.

VCF with baked-in Private AI will debut in Broadcom’s Q1 2026, sometime between early November 2025 and late January 2026.

VMware also announced a closer relationship with Canonical that will see it include the company’s cut of Linux on VCF, and support AI-ready VMs that include precompiled GPU drivers. Those drivers remove the need to pull drivers from outside an organization, an undesirable arrangement for customers that operate in air-gapped environments.

Ubuntu’s chiseled containers – a container format that includes only the bare essentials – will become a first class citizen in the private cloud suite. VMware thinks developers will appreciate chiseled containers’ small attack surface, and ops types will welcome their small footprint and modest use of compute, network, and storage resources.

Another new capability coming to VCF is an “Advanced Cyber Compliance” suite that monitors virtual infrastructure to ensure that it meets predefined desired VM states, and remediates them if configs vary. The offering also includes what VMware describes as “Integrated push-button VM network isolation” that allows recovery from ransomware, or less exotic risks like power outages and hardware failures, into “on-premises clean rooms”.

Of course VMware also has new security doodads for AI, in the form of “Zero Trust lateral security” for AI agents that applies zero trust principles – constant verification of authenticity – to agents as they send traffic over networks and seek to access resources and data.

Other new bits coming to VCF include native S3 support for VMware’s VSAN virtual storage, and the Istio service mesh in the Kubernetes distro shipped in the suite

Reassuring the faithful

Most of the new additions to VCF are nice-to-haves, rather than big strides forward. And fair enough given VCF 9.0, a major release, debuted in June.

They’re still significant, however, because Broadcom’s critics have suggested its plans to increase VMware’s profitability will see it slow innovation, a notion Broadcom fueled by slowing the cadence of VCF releases.

Broadcom execs used the Explore keynote to emphasize that VCF will keep evolving. They also restated the argument that implementing all of VCF is the best way to realize its value, and backed that with news that UK financial services giant Barclays and retail behemoth Walmart have both decided to go all-in on the private cloud suite.

Big brands pledging allegiance to vendors they’ve worked with for years, and would struggle to ditch, is standard tech conference fare.

The most powerful testimonial from the keynote therefore came from Jeremy Wright, director of IT Infrastructure at US insurer Grinnell Mutual, who said that at this time last year, he felt Broadcom was not targeting his 17-person tech team. He’s since signed up for VCF 9, which he says will help him to save $1 million a year on storage costs, improve developer productivity, and allow Grinnell Mutual to change the conversation it has with other tech suppliers.

Wright got more time on stage than some VMware presenters, and for good reason: His experience defies assumptions that Broadcom is only interested in the very largest users. ®

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