How simplicity benefits the IT partner ecosystem

Modern business can be fast-paced and even faster-moving. For every problem, there is a potential solution ranging from a simple fix to something much more complex.

But there’s value in recognising where systems are too chaotic or overwhelming for users - perhaps even helping rather than hindering. Indeed, just knowing where processes can be streamlined, automated, or replaced with more efficient approaches, is beneficial.

Simplification can be useful across the board. It isn’t just about consolidating the existing products organisations own or use, or partners choose to support. It’s also about ensuring any tools, software, and hardware that your business onboards is a good fit and one that will prevent additional and unnecessary complexity.

Crucially, it’s also a rejection of the idea that operating at the cutting edge means spinning lots of plates – and an acknowledgment that powerful systems can also be equally easy to use and manage.

Nowhere is this more true than in the cloud, which has undergone rapid expansion and contraction in the past decade as businesses chased the scalability and flexibility of the public cloud, the agility of the hybrid cloud, and the security reassurances of the private cloud. Over time, initial gains in the cloud may have turned into complex cloud systems, hanging like a millstone about the neck of business leaders seeking a more lightweight solution.

Speaking at the VMware Explore 2024 event in Las Vegas, Hock Tan, president and CEO at Broadcom, reasserted that Broadcom provides the simplicity, reliability, and flexibility of the private cloud in sharp comparison to the taxing ‘three Cs’ of public cloud: cost, complexity, and compliance.

Tan also acknowledged the issue of repatriation, in which organisations shift workloads back on-premise, arguing that this is a natural shift toward simplicity and lower costs. VMware stands ready to meet any need for private and hybrid cloud as organisations move away from public cloud, via VMware Cloud Foundation. This provides a simplified private cloud platform for better control and cloud resilience.

No matter where they’re hosted, siloed workloads can be a major hurdle to smooth operations and Tan argued they can take much longer to manage and fix when issues arise. This is where VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) comes in.

VCF is designed to ensure everything works together well and - as Tan highlighted - to enable organisations to deploy it as a full stack so their entire data center can be virtualised.

At VMware Explore 2024, Tan said that this solution was both resilient and secure as well as costing less than the public cloud.

Streamlined products for better outcomes

Under Broadcom’s leadership, the company has worked to greatly simplify VMware’s product range to make purchasing and licensing decisions far easier for IT leaders.

The company has also streamlined its 8,000 SKU offering down to four major bundles: VCF, VVF (VMware vSphere Foundation), VVEP (VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus) and VVS (VMware vSphere Standard). Alongside these, unique features are still available via a number of SKUs.

An added benefit of this change is the improved value of the VMware product portfolio. With just a handful of purchasing decisions, businesses can unlock all the benefits of the VMware platform and discover the benefits of Broadcom’s approach for themselves.

Advanced services such as private AI, disaster recovery, automation, container operations, edge orchestration, and advanced security all fall under the VCF banner so that customers have easy and integrated access to everything their business needs.

VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia is a standout here as it provides customers with a streamlined framework for adopting generative AI. Here, Broadcom helps customers use AI wherever their data already resides, reducing the complexity of adding the technology to their existing infrastructure and ensuring it respects their data privacy.

This is available as an SKU on top of the VCF bundle with transparent costs and quick adoption times. “People loved the fact that we can take these complex AI applications, dozens of microservices, and be able to stand them up in minutes,” said Chris Wolf, global head of Private AI, VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom, speaking live onstage at VMware Explore in Barcelona.

VCF can scale and control workloads automatically, reducing the burden on customers and lowering overall costs. This can help simplify the adoption of AI before IT teams become overwhelmed with tasks such as manually tracking virtualised GPUs.

“We’ve had customers tell us that running AI services on our stack can be up to one-third the cost of comparable public cloud AI services,” explained Wolf at VMware Explore.

Simplification for security oversight

Another benefit of consolidating services and platform simplification is improved oversight. Without the chaos and complexity of too many tools and services, leaders have more time and visibility over their core environments and can apply security and controls more effectively.

To this end, Broadcom has added several advanced security features to VCF. This includes better threat detection and network security capabilities that come bundled within VCF and vSphere.

With its powerful internal AI features, VCF also aims to simplify the process of investigating security incidents. Project Cypress, a new generative AI assistant for security teams that will become available with VCF 9, can provide detailed summaries of detected vulnerabilities and provide pointers on improving defenses to prevent repeats.

VMware vSAN remote snapshots now generate backups of critical business data automatically, further reducing the burden on security teams and making data recovery in the face of ransomware a far less daunting task. On a daily basis, the vSAN hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) encrypts data at rest to ensure all sensitive data is protected. Administrators can use vSAN to make the management of decryption keys easier.

Ultimately, with the expertise of Broadcom and the simplification possible via VMware offerings, leaders can hold onto the hope of leaving cloud chaos in the past.