VMware Explore 2025 Recap: Broadcom’s Big Announcements and What’s Next - Six Five On The Road

What do Broadcom's announcements at VMware Explore 2025 mean for the future of private cloud, AI, and hybrid infrastructure for enterprise IT?

‍

Hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman discuss Broadcom’s strategic announcements at VMware Explore 2025. The conversation centers on the launch of VCF 9.0, new AI partnerships, and Broadcom’s vision for delivering secure, scalable hybrid cloud platforms – with a special focus on hybrid infrastructure and private cloud.

‍

Key Takeaways Include:

‍

🔹VCF 9.0 Launch: VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is a fully integrated private cloud platform, unifying compute, networking, storage, and security, and enabling seamless in-place upgrades for enterprise environments.

‍

🔹Private and Hybrid Cloud Flexibility: Broadcom’s strategy emphasizes the resurgence of private cloud, allowing workloads to run on-premises, in the cloud, or across hybrid environments, with broad support for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and Canonical Ubuntu.

‍

🔹AI-Ready Foundation: Deep partnerships with NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Canonical ensure VCF 9.0 is primed for enterprise AI, offering unified CPU/GPU management, AI-optimized tools, and secure, accelerated AI model deployment.

‍

🔹Developer Agility with IT Control: VCF 9.0 bridges the needs of developers and IT operations by supporting self-service Kubernetes, CI/CD, and both container and VM orchestration, streamlining secure app delivery and compliance.

‍

🔹Enhanced Security & Compliance: Integrated micro-segmentation, identity-based access, full-stack encryption, and advanced cyber compliance features address the evolving security requirements for regulated industries.

‍

Learn more at Broadcom

‍

Watch the full video at sixfivemedia.com, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

‍

Or listen to the audio here:

‍

IMPORTANT: Note to Uploader: Libsyn AUDIO EMBED - added by uploader.

‍Disclaimer:Six Five On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

Patrick Moorhead: Welcome back to the Six Five On the Road. But we're not actually on the road. But we are Daniels coming back from VMware Explorer 2025 in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, I could not make it. Daniel, you were there, but I was watching from afar.

‍

Daniel Newman: I missed you there. But if you watch the video that we did with Hock Tan while we were there, I virtually introduced you, stage left as if you were there because to me, like, it's just not the same without you, buddy.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: That's really, really kind. I appreciate that.. I did really get pulled in though and the really biggest thing for this keynote and Matt and I did write an article about this was VCF 9.0 and the details behind it, the execution of it, the all in nature of it. Rolling out a bunch of customer metrics. Right. How many have adopted what they're using and then they went deep as well.

‍

Daniel Newman: Yeah, absolutely. If you want that high level, check out this sit down I did with Hawk Tan. If you want to go deep. We had Paul Turner, who was the other key speaker at the event, go much deeper across the platform. But yeah, Pat, I mean at the highest level, Hock Tan doubled down on what he said a year ago after the acquisition was made. And he said, you know, the private cloud is alive and well and that basically workloads are going to go from the public cloud back to the private cloud. But what was required was something like VCF 9 to make that more plausible. Because what really is needed by it besides that sort of more gradual process of upgrading, right, that no rip and replace. They needed the platform to have all the bells and whistles that you get when you move to a public cloud. And so it took some work, it took some effort and I mean they skipped four generations ahead from 1.52 to 9.0. I'm kidding. You have to understand the VMware numbering to understand this 9.0. But having said that, Pat, they came out and they had a lot of action packed. You love the word payload. A lot of payload inside of VCF 9. And I think Hock was doing a bit of a victory lap because the business has held up. The long tail is sticking around, they're sticking around with virtualization and other products. Even as prices have gone up, even as, you know, some of the things that, you know, there's all the fud, kind of, oh, everyone's leaving. Some are. But you know what? That was actually the plan all along and actually more of the long tail sticking with it. And VCF 9 is really designed to be in place upgrades, meaning eventually when these companies get around to it, they can upgrade.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, Dan, if I look back, you know, it's so funny, I always like to do the victory lap on it. I was talking about private cloud 10 years ago, right? And never happened. And big challenges there, like you actually have to have an entire stack of software that works. Right. It's not just, hey, I'm delivering up virtualized workloads or containerized workloads. You have to integrate with security, networking is involved. And OpenStack really had none of that, which is why it didn't take off. VCF isn't new. We're on the fourth or fifth version, the ninth version, I don't. I don't know. But it, it. I would say you can finally put up an AWS stack and VCF 9 and, and have a kind of a like, a like for like. And it's ga. So, Dan, we're four minutes in and we haven't even talked about AI. Did you talk at all with Hock about AI?

‍

Daniel Newman: Yeah, we talked about everything. We had the, the long off camera, which I can't tell any of you about what we said, and then we had the on camera, which of course I hope you all have a chance to watch. But yes, AI was very much front and center. A year ago it was VMware Private AI. And this year there was another real adder there. They've got the Nvidia private AI. They more recently announced the Intel Gaudi private AI. And then this year they came out with the amd. So now they've gone all the way. And then of course, when it comes to, you know, partnerships, they also added their canonical Ubuntu, which is the OS for cloud. And that partnership is just deepening. How user friendly. I mean, here's the thing, Pat, like, VMware is really IT friendly. When I was trying to push through the room, I looked around and I said, look, this is a room full of absolute IT geeks. These people love the build out of this infrastructure, but they're bringing it all together here and they're making AI possible. Because to make AI possible, Pat, they need to not only bring home the CPU and GPU side of things, they also need to bring together the IT and the developer side of things because in this era, even more so than in the CPU era, the developers rule the roost. And the idea that you have to have your infrastructure for developers off somewhere else and you can't be doing any sort of sandbox, you can't be doing any sort of real time development on your production systems isn't going to work well when you're trying to move as fast as AI moves. So they're building it for AI images, containers, runtime, schedule tools so you can deploy models more rapidly and do it all securely and you can bring developers, DevOps and it closer together.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it's so funny we're talking about this like this is something new, but the entire AWS was formed based on a developer who wanted to just swipe their credit card to be able to get access to server storage, networking and security and you know, you just couldn't do that. You know, it used to take three months to get compute, you know, six months to get storage, about nine months to spin up, spin up networking and then you know, the security was whatever, whatever the company had. So yeah, it's like we're finally here, here. Daniel, you know, on the private A. I want to go back to that. A little one, one piece that I thought was a huge deal is that bundling in private AI is a free add on for everybody. And I think strategically VMware knows how important that is and they want to get a trial, they want to remove every objection to get there. And not only are they, are they giving funds to customers as a percentage of revenue to get them into vcf. They're now putting private AI in there because you know, if you're going to put the effort into private AI, you're probably going to be that you're, you're going to be a VMware customer for a very long time and you're not just going to rip in, rip and replace here. So you know Dan, with our AI talk track, right. Ultimately invariably we get into this conversation of security and I did see a stepping up of the security posture here and whether it's built in, micro segmentation, identity based access controls, encryption in motion and at rest. It's funny, every time it looks like, oh, something seems to be very secure and then people are adding new features of it and then you're like, was it secure from the beginning or is this because these threats are changing? That's something I need to do a little bit of homework on.

‍

Daniel Newman: Well, obviously AI is an amazing creator. It drives tons of opportunities for efficiency, it's a productivity workhorse. But anything that works that well becomes a black hat's best friend. Right? I mean, can you imagine them. I think I saw you on X complaining about all the nonsense calls and, and spam. And of course, you know, I go through my emails now and I'm always just blown away by how good some of these phishing attempts are. Yeah. And you know, this isn't the exact security as it relates to necessarily controlling and securing your, Your, your, your VMs or your data center, but it's that same sort of motion in terms of how aggressive these black hats will be able to be. So it's up to the vendors, the hyperscalers, the software providers, your company like VMware, it's up to them to of course try to build the best in class security offerings and really build with security in mind. So you kind of put those three things together. We talked about IT plus developers. It's really IT plus developer plus security, because that is the optimal enterprise stack right now, is that it's able to address all those things and of course work in a way that's going to be complementary and favorable for AI and AI development. Because realistically, Pat, and here's the thing, right, we had that study come out about MIT, that 95% of AI doesn't work.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Didn't that end up to be nonsense?

‍

Daniel Newman: I hope people, you know, that's my favorite word. I hope people read it because I think really what it is is the human condition is actually persisting through AI. It's been in every transformation, right? Remember digital transformation, Pat, you make fun of it. Analog transformation, you jokingly, it's like, because what did we do? We're like, oh, this is how we write the order on paper. Can we create a digital version of this and have little boxes you can fill in with your keyboard? I mean, with AI we have the same problem. There's a lack of intellectual curiosity in some companies. There's certainly fear of the implementation and deployment. This is slowing things down a little bit. And so, you know, so as enterprises do ramp up though, they need to ramp up their AI, but they also need to ramp up and secure. They need to be compliant, they need to be governed, they need to do all those things. Well, Pat, but of course putting it all together is tough. And with VCF 9, you know, in house that you mentioned micro segmentation, you mentioned identity based controls and they now offer that advanced cyber compliance which is that real time monitoring, you know, a bit of an observability engine right inside of VMware.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So as, as we bring this to a close here, Daniel, you know, a few stories, right, that came out that people were talking to me about was that they felt like it was a very different experience this year. Right. 2024 was kind of like saying goodbye to a friend. And then 2025 was like, okay, we, we've got the team, like we've got the customers that we want. We have the channel partners that we want and everybody is on. Everybody is, is on, is on board in this, this oh, woe is me. And you know that, that, that sounds awful but my gosh, they raised prices on me and there's still customers signed up for the three year tour and, and might be, you know, putting in a partial plan B. But for the most part the vibe seemed very positive and, and future forward. I don't know if you felt that when you were on the ground there, Daniel.

‍

Daniel Newman: Yeah, there was plenty of energy. I mean, I was in the halls, I was walking, I was listening. There was enthusiasm, there's excitement, There were a couple cheers when Paul Turner was presenting. Oh, wow stuff, you know, we brought up Ubuntu. They got, there was some excitement in the room, you know, when they, you know, we're talking about some of the customers. And they did a nice job too, Pat, because they had that 9 out of 10 number that I think it's 9 out of 10 of the 10 largest fortune companies on VMware. Pretty nice stat. But we all knew that, we all knew that the biggest customers were going to stay on. But the whole question with Hawk strategy was how does that sort of potentially push out some of the smaller, the longer tail and showing that some small customers that get it, that are modernizing or sticking with it and investing in VCF 9. And again, it's not going to be all VCF9 and all private. They're very aware and they're acknowledging the fact that it's going to be hybrid multi, which is your favorite thing. You called it early, I'll give it to you. I wasn't even in the business when you were calling this stuff. I mean that's how long ago it was. You're my favorite. You're my favorite boomer, by the way. He's not a boomer. It doesn't matter though. I'll never stop saying it. It was a good event. There was a lot of good energy there. It was great to have sit downs with a number of their executives. And of course, people should definitely check out your Forbes column as well because you dug into some of the depths of the announcements there as well.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: Well, Daniel, thank you for bringing me VMware Explorer 2025.

‍

Daniel Newman: Yeah, I'm here for you. I'm here for you, buddy.

‍

Patrick Moorhead: And listen, I just want to thank everybody for tuning in here. Check out all the content like Daniel talked about. Hit all of the Six Five content with VMware and all the private cloud content out there. Hit that subscribe button and tune into our weekly show that airs at about, I think, 9am Central, 8am Central on Monday morning. It needs to be your filler, what to get excited about before you hit that tech week. Take care and bye bye.

‍