Broadcom CEO Hock Tan told VMware Explore 2024 conference attendees they are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) brought on by IT investments in public clouds that have only led to higher costs, increased complexity and created more compliance challenges.
The cure to treat that is to standardize on a private cloud based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) that unifies compute, storage and networking in a way that IT teams can deploy anywhere.
Designed to run both monolithic and microservices-based applications, Broadcom has been making a case for replacing VMware perpetual license with a subscription to a VCF private cloud platform that lowers the total cost of IT. The latest version of VCF, launched today, tightens integrations between the components of VCF to further lower costs by providing access to not just vSphere for virtual machines but also vSAN and NSX network virtualization software, and a raft of other capabilities. In effect, Broadcom contends that most enterprise IT organizations will need these capabilities and that compared to a combination of third-party platforms, VCF is less expensive.
In the absence of that integration, Han noted IT organizations are “so screwed” because the silos that get created within IT organizations make it too difficult for IT teams to work together in a way that enables organizations to innovate.
In fact, IT professionals that have the expertise needed to run an integrated private cloud based on VCF will find they have become more valuable to the organizations that employ them.
It’s not clear to what degree IT organizations are moving to consolidate the management of IT infrastructure, but reining in the total cost of IT is becoming a more pressing issue as more application workloads are distributed from the cloud to the network edge.
In fact, The Futurum Group projects there will be an increase of 500 to 1,000 production applications per location in the next three years.
Paul Nashawaty, practice lead for application development for The Futurum Group, said the Broadcom private cloud strategy aligns with the need to build and deploy workloads that will be distributed across multiple locations.
Of course, consolidation IT environments will require overcoming a significant amount of inherent inertia, and Broadcom has encountered some resistance to eliminating VMware perpetual licenses. Additionally, many IT organizations have made significant investment in not just platforms, but also acquiring the skills and expertise required to manage them. Replacing legacy platforms would require a transition period that would span multiple years.
On the other hand, many IT teams are also realizing that many of the workloads that have been deployed in the cloud cost less than to run in an on-premises IT environment, and with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) more organizations are looking to deploy AI models where most of their data resides. In general, the location of more of that data is still in an on-premises IT environment, rather than in the cloud.
Naturally, the level of PTSD created by public clouds that is being experienced is going to vary widely from one organization to another. The issue that IT teams are wrestling now with is what precisely to do to treat it.
