Public clouds are 'dirty' about VMware's on-prem push, says Broadcom CEO Hock Tan

VMware Explore Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has told members of VMware's user group that public clouds are not entirely happy with his private cloud push.

Speaking at a function during the VMware Explore conference yesterday, Tan told the audience the virtualization giant's mission is now "taking workloads back from the public cloud."

"I already am getting dirty emails from the hyperscalers," the CEO added. "They say something like: 'Hey, what are you telling them? What are you doing to us?'"

Tan said his answer is "No different to what you have been doing to us the last ten years" – a reference to his Tuesday remarks that public clouds have made IT more expensive and complex than their native environments. Now VMware intends to make life harder for hyperscalers.

This is tricky territory. Broadcom's strategy for VMware involves partnerships with hyperscalers that include license portability – the ability to buy a software subscription and deploy it at any participating partner – to targets such as Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud. VMware considers this to be a "private cloud" because hyperscalers' VMware services see customers rent an entire host. Yet even as VMware tries to send hyperscalers' customers to private clouds, it's arguing that their native IaaS environments are expensive and should only be used for bursty workloads.

No wonder some of those emails are "dirty."

Tan also told the User Group that 85 percent of VMware sales bookings are now for the Cloud Foundation suite – the big bundle of products that Broadcom has made VMware's primary product.

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However, Broadcom has acknowledged the shortcoming of VCF in not delivering on pre-acquisition VMware's claims of allowing the creation of seamless hybrid clouds spanning compute, storage, and networking.

A recent release addressed some of those issues, and at VMware Explore this week, the chip giant has promised further improvements. It will create consistent APIs and SDKs for all the components of VCF, and a future major release – VCF 9 – that will unify management consoles so operators of private clouds can manage compute, networking, and storage without needing to use different tools.

At the user group function, Tan called on attendees to ensure that VCF is deployed and operationalized.

"We are very open about this in the last couple of days, which is we want those workloads to come back," he said, adding that he wants workloads that are currently on-prem to remain there.

"We have got to get it deployed," he added. "I am counting on the fact that all you guys are very important to the cause."

IT pros who drive VCF implementations, he suggested, will see their relevance and importance elevated in the orgs wherein they toil. ®