Can VMware's private cloud spur the demise of siloed tech?

To kick off VMware Explore 2024, Broadcom CEO Hock E. Tan delivered a harsh truth during his keynote address, saying, "You inherited legacy data centers, which has created best of breed in compute, in storage and in networking. You are very siloed; you are so screwed."

That statement perfectly encapsulates both the fundamental limitation hindering contemporary private cloud environments and the internal inefficiencies in VMware's product development -- inefficiencies that Broadcom claims to have remedied following its 2023 acquisition of VMware.

Building products from a collection of siloed technologies, or even loosely integrated offerings, creates inefficiencies. Tan described VMware internal development preacquisition in a similar way: too many teams, with too many different agendas and too many inefficiencies hampering their efforts. To achieve success as a business and to best support its customers, VMware must consolidate its offerings and simplify its portfolio.

The result of those efforts is a full-stack private cloud platform called VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, introduced at VMware Explore last week.

VCF 9 delivers several innovations, including the following:

1. Multiple management and automation enhancements to significantly improve the operational efficiency of private cloud environments for cloud admins, cloud consumers, DevOps engineers, platform engineers and development teams. The new look focuses on providing fleet-level scale and centralizes multiple functions, including capacity and tenant management, governance policy configuration and security. For users, the improvements focus on making VCF 9 environments as self-service as possible.
2. Integration of VCF Diagnostics, Application Topology and Network Analysis to simplify and accelerate root-cause analysis and resolution of application issues and performance hiccups.
3. Improvements to VCF import, which simplifies the integration of existing VMware technology deployments into VCF environments. This latest version will support the integration of VMware NSX as well as several additional vSAN topologies.
4. Enhancements to the vSphere Kubernetes Service. VCF will include out-of-the-box support for Windows containers, direct network connectivity through VPC and native Open Virtualization Format support, enhancing the flexibility and scalability of containerized applications.
5. Multiple improvements to support modern application environments, such as enhancements to vSphere Kubernetes Service, and advanced security to encrypt and isolate workloads.
6. Enhancements to vSAN, with the addition of integrated deduplication, vSAN-to-vSAN data protection and vSAN Express Storage Architecture stretched site recovery.
7. Multiple networking improvements, including simplified management during the creation of virtual networks and various performance enhancements.

The breadth of these advances aligns with the core strategic direction VMware and Broadcom are committed to moving forward -- namely, delivering consolidated releases while also providing enhancements across a portfolio of capabilities that are validated and delivered as a full-stack private cloud.

Ultimately, it will be VMware's roadmap of innovation that will play a major role in determining its long-term success. Abrupt changes to VMware's licensing model earlier this year led to frustration among partners and customers who experienced increased costs when switching to the new subscription model. The frustration, in turn, led to increased interest in alternatives from players such as Microsoft, Red Hat and Nutanix.

That frustration has not completely subsided, and it likely played a role in this year's lighter attendance at VMware Explore. But among those who did attend, there was both a general acceptance of VMware's new subscription model and even a tempered level of excitement about the potential of VMware's private cloud vision. That excitement stems from the goodwill that VMware has generated with its users over the years, and those users' expectations that a subscription model will translate into more innovation and value for them down the road.

It is also important to note that while VMware's messaging at this year's event was private-cloud-centric, VMware's private cloud vision also incorporates multi-cloud environments: VCF can be deployed on premises or within public cloud environments with a common experience.

Based on our analysis at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, there are real merits to VMware's approach. IT and cloud complexity is hindering contemporary digital initiatives. According to our research, 68% of organizations agreed that overall complexity is slowing IT operations and initiatives.

The question that VMware will have to answer is if it can continue to return enough value via future innovation to cover the investment its customers are making with the new subscription model.

There is a connection between improved operational efficiency stemming from superior infrastructure automation and a subsequent ability to build a stronger, more competitive business. Whether or not your organization buys into Broadcom's vision for VMware, you should be working to adopt a private cloud experience to reduce the burden on internal admins while accelerating developers' access to resources. Faster operations create not just greater efficiency, but also more cycles allocated to growing the business.

The tradeoff of a full-stack solution, however, is choice -- the option to simply select and use the tools you want. VMware believes that the increased simplicity and capabilities its private cloud can deliver at scale will provide greater value in the long run. The idea is, for the typical enterprise, building a unique version of the private cloud is not sustainable.

The users I spoke to at the event clearly appreciate VMware's vision, and many will prioritize increased adoption of more VCF elements in their environments to increase VMware's value internally. In addition, multiple users at the event indicated that their organization is actively evaluating their compute environments, seeking to increase utilization to "future optimize" the value of their VMware subscriptions.

The private-cloud-centric future that VMware presents is a beneficial one to enterprise environments, and it has the potential to deliver very real gains in operational simplicity. How valuable the VCF's private cloud will be, however, will depend on VMware continuing its pace of innovation and maintaining its focus on delivering the kind of integrated, full-stack private cloud enterprises want. The question that VMware will have to answer is if it can continue to return enough value via future innovation to cover the investment its customers are making with the new subscription model.

Scott Sinclair is Practice Director with TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, covering the storage industry.

Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.