VMware Cloud Foundation Goes AI Native: Broadcom’s Move to Integrate AI into Enterprise Infrastructure Amid Licensing Controversy

At the recent VMware Explore conference, Broadcom announced that its VMware Cloud Foundation platform has been enhanced to support AI capabilities. This move aligns with the rapid adoption of large language models across the technology industry, although it comes amidst ongoing criticism over licensing policy changes following Broadcom’s acquisition of virtualization giant VMware in November 2023.

The discontinuation of the platform’s free tier, allegations of aggressive sales tactics, and several court cases related to existing agreements have led some users to reconsider their reliance on VMware as a foundation for their IT infrastructure. As a result, companies like Nutanix, SUSE, and IBM have benefited from users leaving the VMware ecosystem.

However, given the complexity of VMware deployments, migrating workloads out of heavily-virtualized environments can be costly and risky for organizations in terms of quality of service (QoS) metrics. It may therefore be wiser to stay with a known devil rather than risk migration to an alternative solution.

Broadcom’s goal is to make it easier for users to deploy AI models and agents within their existing environments. VMware Private AI Services, set to ship with VCF 9 subscriptions next year, will offer everything needed to build and run AI on-premise or outside hyperscale facilities. This package will include a model store, indexing services, vector databases, an agentic AI builder, and an API gateway for optimized machine-to-machine communication between AI models.

At the conference, attendees were informed that AI’s presence in the enterprise is expected to grow significantly, making it logical for AI to be a feature of every VMware-based infrastructure. Broadcom’s offerings are seen as a step towards AI integration, but not a groundbreaking innovation. The company also announced improvements to the VMware Tanzu Platform, including simplified MCP server publishing and a new data lakehouse, Tanzu Data Intelligence.

A notable addition is Intelligent Assist for VCF, an AI-powered chatbot with access to the VMware knowledgebase. This bot aims to reduce the time between a user’s issue or question and the point of contact with a human support agent.

The hype surrounding container adoption led many to predict the decline of traditional virtualization, similar to how cloud services were believed to render on-premise databases obsolete. However, legacy infrastructure continues to compel enterprise users to consolidate around the platforms they have invested in, despite high licensing fees and costs.

Although Broadcom is adding a touch of AI magic to its interactions with customers, it understands that its long-term revenue is rooted in the presence of legacy infrastructure at the core of the enterprise.

Image source: “Virtual Try On” by jurvetson, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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