Enterprises that once rushed to move workloads into the public cloud are now being urged to reconsider the balance. At VMware Explore 2025 in Las Vegas, Broadcom argued that private cloud is becoming the future of enterprise IT, with its chief executive Hock Tan saying that “private cloud now outperforms public cloud” on security, cost management and control.
Tan told the audience that enterprise IT priorities are shifting back towards on-premises infrastructure. He cited a global survey of IT professionals in which seven out of ten respondents said they plan to increase investment in private cloud. “Last year I was here, we talked about private cloud being the future of the enterprise. Twelve months later, the future is here, and we have the data to back that up,” he said.
He explained that since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware two years ago, the company has focused on integrating the building blocks of a cloud platform. “We rolled up our sleeves, did the tough engineering work, and the result today is VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 — a real software-defined platform to run all your application workloads with compute, networking and storage tightly integrated,” he said.
Enterprise challenges
Tan outlined three areas where enterprises face friction in adopting private cloud. The first, he said, is meeting developer needs. “Developers do not want to think about infrastructure. Modern apps run on containers, and developers just want to write code using their favourite DevOps tools. With VCF 9.0 we run containers as seamlessly as we run virtual machines,” he said.
The second challenge is organisational silos between IT teams. “Your networking, your storage, your compute, your security — each of these teams speaks their own language. Once again, this unified platform changes all that,” Tan said.
The third is legacy infrastructure, which he argued continues to weigh down enterprises. “Most of you continue to be weighed down by your legacy infrastructure, and you are afraid to move forward. The answer is not to run straight to the public cloud, as you did five or ten years ago. If you are going to do cloud, do it right. Embrace VCF 9.0 and stay on-prem,” he said.
AI integration
Broadcom announced that Private AI Services are now included in VCF 9.0, covering model fine-tuning, inference, runtime and vector database integration.
The company also expanded its collaboration with NVIDIA, with VCF 9.0 now supporting NVIDIA’s Blackwell architecture GPUs and networking hardware including ConnectX-7 and BlueField-3 DPUs.
A new service, VCF Advanced Cyber Compliance, was introduced for regulated industries. It adds automated compliance checks, disaster recovery with network isolation and integrated security updates.
Broadcom also unveiled updates to its application and data services. VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence, a new data lakehouse service, provides unified access to multimodal data for AI and analytics. Tanzu Platform 10.3 was launched to support the development of generative AI within enterprise applications.
Developer-focused features included Intelligent Assist for VCF, an AI-based support tool in preview, and support for the Model Context Protocol to connect AI assistants with enterprise tools. A multi-accelerator runtime was announced to allow models to run across AMD and NVIDIA GPUs without code changes. In addition, Broadcom introduced native vSAN S3 object storage to support block, file and object workloads in a single environment.
Tan pointed to adoption across industries, highlighting Barclays as an example. “For them, VCF is not just infrastructure. It’s powering their business. It’s delivering a secure private cloud for all their applications, including AI,” he said.
Broadcom said nine of the top ten Fortune 500 companies now use VCF, along with 95 per cent of top manufacturers, 90 per cent of public sector organisations and 85 per cent of financial services firms.
One of the most prominent new customers is Walmart, which has selected Broadcom as its strategic vendor for virtualisation. The retailer will standardise on VCF to manage and operate IT infrastructure across its global operations. By doing so, Walmart aims to unify its distributed private cloud environments and simplify the management of compute, networking and storage across multiple regions.
Broadcom also announced professional services aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. These are designed to help organisations without large IT teams plan, deploy and operate VMware vSphere and VCF. The intention is to lower barriers for companies that want private cloud capabilities but require additional implementation and management support.
Tan positioned VCF 9.0 as the culmination of VMware’s technology and Broadcom’s integration effort. “VCF 9.0 is the culmination of 25 years of VMware technology and innovation, and this is the platform for the future,” he said.
