Hey everyone, the 65 is on the road here in Las Vegas, Nevada for VMware Explore 2025. Just finished up the general session. And we are actually sitting here on the main stage because we have the main keynoter here with me today, president and CEO Hock Tan of Broadcom joining me to talk about the session, talk about the event. Hock, welcome back to the 65.
It's so great to have you back. You know, we sat here, you and me, and Pat, visible Pat, he's right here. I think it was right after the first keynote, right after you made the acquisition. All that came together. A lot of events that took place and you got on stage, you gave the keynote and I still remember when you got us started, you really kind of made this strong case that private cloud that enterprises needed to stay on prem. A year later, you doubled down. Congratulations and welcome back to Vegas here.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Dan. Glad to be here.
So, let's just talk about the general session. And I mean, first of all, lot of progress made on VCF 9. You showed a ton of additional features. We'll actually talk to Paul Turner later, who is also on the stage. We'll dig into the meat, but with you, I just kind of want to get your overall the big main message that you were really hoping that everyone came away with after seeing this morning's keynote.
Well, I think you're right to describe it as we doubled down and but that was what we had promised the audience that in fact this is exactly what when we had a discussion two years ago the primary reason why we acquired VMware we see that they have the technology they just have not put together the platform with the VCF 9.0 we actually put together from ground up a complete platform. See last year was still a journey when we took the various components we inherited from VMware improve it better interoperability and stitch it together and that was VCF 5.2. Today we move to VCF 9.0 which while we were pushing VCF 5.2 as a private cloud platform. What we wanted to do ultimately is create from ground up this 9.0 which is available today. So no, it's very exciting times and we prove this is something we could do and we got it done.
Well, there's a lot to be done though too because so many of the customers and you and I have had several conversations over the last year. Still sticking closely to VMware even as you've really sort of reiterated how important it is that everyone moves to platform that the future is not in any one component. It's not just the networking. It's not just security. It's not just virtualization. It's really about the platform. This gives your customers the ability to bring the workloads on prem which you saw what nine out of 10 of the largest Fortune 500 companies are all working with you. The economics are really good when you bring it as platform you get better value out of all of it by integrating it all. But I'd like to hear from you there's some big advantages that you see besides the maths the economics which is the one I keep saying. What do you see as those big advantages that you're creating for those customers? Those nine out of 10 and more that are sticking with you.
Actually, what we're creating is very simply where the direction of IT infrastructure technology roadmap is headed. It was 25 years ago. VMware came in with this great technology which is compute virtualization and created through creating a hypervisor to virtualize the CPUs, the compute and that was great because it was done to literally increase utilization the way application run on CPUs to increase utilization of the CPU. But over the last 20, 25 years especially the public cloud showed it. This whole thing about improving utilization has extended beyond that to say that if you can virtualize compute, you might as well virtualize the rest of the hardware components in a data center and create this abstraction layer software which in effect applications run on in any kind of hardware sitting in a data center. And that's the road map that has progressed over the last 20 years. And so it's a necessary thing to do. The issue is many of the customers of VMware and anybody else on prem when they run their data centers, they have not changed from 20 years ago. And what we're saying is guys, it's time to modernize. And the cloud, the public cloud guys just showed the way so loud and clear that they could run it more efficiently much better. At least from the perspective of developers trying to run new deploy new apps is to virtualize your entire data center and create a software-defined data center what you call platform. Is the path towards moving of what data centers need to become to run high velocity modern apps. That's all we're fulfilling. We're fulfilling what is the right road map things are going along but the inflection arc of AI has actually accelerated this if companies are going to get serious about building and deploying AI powered applications.
Last year you did private AI. This year you came back and you've expanded and continued on offering. You partnered with Nvidia, you partnered with Intel and Gaudi 3, you announced AMD today. But not just the actual running on these GPUs, but also all the services, the microservices that have to run around this. I mean, isn't this another really important advantage and inflection and reason that customers move to platform if they want to get serious about AI?
It is, it's a great tailwind for customers to think hard about adopting VCF as a platform as a platform for them to keep running to modernize the data centers for no other reason than simply the fact that a GPU is just another compute engine from a CPU and our VCF hypervisor abstraction platform runs both. So as workloads in enterprises progress to running AI workloads in addition to traditional x86 workloads it's a natural platform that you pick one VCF and with AI cloud foundation we deploy we actually can create that allows workloads to know where to go to run most optimally whether it's CPUs or GPUs all on the same platform within the same data center. So, it's a perfect tailwind towards customers tending to look towards it and saying, 'Yeah, let's adopt VCF 9.0 because we're the only ones available on prem today that does it.'
Yeah. Well, the customers are saying out loud that they want to bring workloads back. There's a number of different reasons. Of course, a lot of the administrators that run these are very familiar with the VCF platform and again how quickly everyone has to learn, Hock, to succeed with AI this transition the fact that you've made it platform and you've kind of said like look scale up scale out no matter what type of compute you're using what kind of applications you're building do it all here that's really important right now because these IT leaders are under pressure right now to get these out get apps developed fast add AI add the capabilities and by the way, do it without overly spending on all of this. It seems that you've sort of broken down some of those challenges. I want to ask you because you mentioned three friction points. One of your big kind of highlights in the keynote were three big points of friction that the enterprises have with adoption and moving forward. What are those? Share a little of those with the audience.
Well, that's a great question and let put it in perspective which I highlighted out there because the first part of my keynote was hey we got this fully integrated tightly knit platform combining compute networking and storage all together. So great, you create yourself a software defined data center. You have the technology. It's about saying we got the technology working. It's done. It's available. And it shouldn't be a surprise with Broadcom VMware investing the amount we did over the past two years from a base technology that VMware brought on board. We got it all figured out. So the technology works. But now comes the real practical issue. Deploying new ideas even as powerful and compelling as VCF has challenges and the challenges are more organizational and humans really and those are three friction points. One is developers. Developers like to run their own things, do their own DevOps tools and nowadays they like for modern apps they like open source and they run to run containers and that's one big friction how do you deal with developers if you are IT infrastructure now old days VMware is seen as only supporting virtual machines. Well with VCF 9.0, there's no reason it doesn't. It not only runs virtual machines, it runs containers, modern containers just as seamlessly as it run virtual machines. In other words, it's one single platform now that can run both modern workloads and the legacy virtual machine workloads all in one. So that basically enables developers to think about hey I can get a path to production of my apps just as fast with VMware as if I have to run off the public cloud.
So to be really simple though it puts developers where they're working more harmoniously. They work together. It's not so much working.
