Broadcom touts AI-native VMware, but gains aren’t revolutionary

Broadcom’s VMware has taken on the AI mantle, declaring that the VMware Cloud Foundation platform is now “AI native.” The AI features are now a core part of the platform, instead of add-ons requiring additional payment, and VCF’s AI feature set continues to expand, keeping pace with industry trends.

The goal, Broadcom says, is to make it easier for enterprise customers to deploy AI models and agents in a secure, compliant, private cloud environment. And, by its definition, “private cloud,” includes on-prem data centers, colocation facilities, and even “private cloud” infrastructure hosted by the hyperscalers and other cloud providers.

This is different from how some enterprises deploy AI, which is by using services from the AI providers themselves, which can create security, privacy, and compliance risks for enterprises. Deploying AI in private clouds also lets companies take advantage of low-cost, open-source options. These include both large frontier models that are rapidly approaching the big vendors in performance, as well as small models that are used for quick, cost-effective tasks that don’t require deep reasoning and analysis.

In the big picture, however, Broadcom didn’t set the world ablaze with the announcements at its VMware Explore conference. They were all the obvious next steps for the company and do not move the needle forward on AI technology.

It also doesn’t seem like Broadcom is giving any thought to re-architecting the core VMware products to take advantage of generative AI and AI agents in a meaningful way. That’s because VMware’s customer base is heavily dependent on the technology and moving to something new and dramatically different would be extremely difficult.

“We have the relationships,” Umesh Mahajan, Broadcom’s general manager for application networking and security, told Network World. A large organization can’t simply stop using VMware, he says. “These workloads can’t disappear overnight. So, we will continue to have those relationships.”

In addition, VMware’s technology is proprietary, complicated, and not something a startup can easily clone, Prashant Gandhi, the company’s vice president of products, told Network World. “You have to have scale,” Gandhi said. “You have to have robustness, you have to operationalize your enterprise workflows and security policies. All of that is not replicable for the next five, seven, ten years.”

A company isn’t going to want to build its own virtualization technology from scratch, either, said Mahajan, even if agentic AI does make it easier to build new software. “The CEO or CFO is focused on their core business, not on building all kinds of infrastructure.”

“You don’t want to go to some startup unless it’s really revolutionary, but that’s unlikely because we have engineering and technology teams, and we see what is happening in the market, and we’ll adapt,” Mahajan added. He didn’t provide any examples of anything new or revolutionary that VMware was working on in relation to its core platform.

Here are the top announcements from the event:

• VMware Private AI Services will be included in the standard VCF 9 subscription at no additional cost starting in early 2026. According to the company, this includes everything needed to build an end-to-end AI service, including model run time, a model store, a data indexing and retrieval service, a vector database, an API gateway, and an AI agent builder. “AI is touching every application,” Chris Wolf, global head of AI and advanced services for the VMware Cloud Foundation division told reporters and analysts at the conference. “It’s going to be part of our world in everything we do on the IT front. So why shouldn’t it just be a feature of the platform?”
• A partnership with Canonical will allow customers to ship container-based AI applications faster and more securely.
• Tanzu Data Intelligence launched. This is a data lakehouse platform that provides unified access to multimodal data.
• Improvements to the VMware Tanzu Platform that make it easier for developers to self-publish AI agents and MCP servers, making it easier to share AI applications and tools across the enterprise.
• Enhanced AI security features in VMware Cloud Foundation Advanced Cyber Compliance, VMware vDefend, and VMware Avi Load Balancer, including security guardrails for MCP servers.
• VMware also announced the tech preview of Intelligent Assist for VCF, which is an AI chatbot that will help diagnose and resolve issues based on information in Broadcom’s internal knowledge base.

VMware and the AI future

VMware seems to be playing catch-up in some of these announcements. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), for example, is emerging as a foundational standard for connecting AI agents to data sources and tools. VMware has announced support for MCP – but it won’t be available for several months. And when asked about support for other protocols, such as Google’s A2A or IBM’s Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), company executives avoided answering the question.

Meanwhile, Intelligent Assist for VCF – a chatbot designed to help enterprises use the VCP platform – doesn’t have an official release date, and it’s only available in tech preview. Chatbots that answer support questions based on existing documentation are rapidly becoming table stakes throughout the tech ecosystem.

Some vendors are moving even further, deploying AI assistants that can take actions on behalf of users.

“I have not seen true agentic AI where an agent runs real-time and takes action to remediate infrastructure incidents real-time, but it’s coming,” IDC analyst Jevin Jensen told Network World. “Some observability solutions have that today, but they aren’t cheap and don’t compete with VCF.”

He suggested that VMware customers keep an eye out for startups offering “add-on” AI agents for VCF in the future.

“The inclusion of private AI as a free add-on is super smart,” said Matthew Kimball, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. That will deliver a lot of additional value to customers around something that’s a top priority for CIOs, he told Network World. “VMware would be well served to continue beating this drum.”

But he agrees that VMware missed an opportunity to use AI to drive operations. “While the company demonstrated an assistant to help with diagnosis, I expected to see a vision of how a copilot-driven VCF console drove automation across the entire environment, from provisioning to root cause analysis to remediation,” Kimball said. “I am certain the company has a vision and is working on how it begins to enable the autonomous VCF environment through generative and agentic AI.”

It’s important that VMware share this vision with customers, and with the broader market, he said, “as the competitive landscape is perhaps more competitive than ever.”

After VMware changed its licensing terms and some customers saw steep cost increases, many competitors, including Nutanix, have stepped up their efforts to take market share. Nutanix released its GPT-in-a-Box full-stack AI platform two years ago, for example. Last November, this was augmented with Nutanix Enterprise AI platform, which focuses on AI inference management, including selecting, deploying and managing AI models.

But some experts recommend that enterprises preparing for AI might want to look beyond traditional virtualization vendors altogether.

David Giambruno, managing partner at Ancilla, a digital transformation consultancy, has held CIO roles at Shutterstock, Tribune Media, and Revlon. He has led VMware adoption projects as well as projects migrating large companies away from VMware.

VMware customers looking to position themselves well for generative AI would be better off moving to the public clouds, Giambruno said. One reason? The cost savings from moving to a modern platform can be put directly into AI investments, he said. “The last project I did, they saved $85 million – and that’s $85 million they can invest in AI.”

Plus, companies can also use this opportunity to rethink workflows and business processes.

“How did God create the world in seven days? No legacy infrastructure,” Giambruno said.

Editorial disclosure: Network World contributing writer Maria Korolov attended VMware Explore 2025 in person, and her travel costs were paid by Broadcom. The vendor-paid travel does not influence our editorial coverage.

Read more news from VMware Explore 2025:

• Broadcom’s VMware strategy pays off financially, but customers not as keen as Wall Street: To many attendees at this year’s VMware Explore conference, turnout felt smaller, there were fewer sessions than last year, and there were markedly fewer vendors on the exhibit floor. But while the mood among VMware Explore attendees was dour, Broadcom is seeing record gains.
• Broadcom CEO urges cloud-to-on-prem repatriation: “Most of you continue to be weighed down by your infrastructure, and you’re afraid to move forward,” Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said in his conference keynote. “So how do you let go of your IT past so you can build for the future? Well, I can tell you for sure the answer is not to run straight to public cloud, as you did five, ten years ago. If you’re going to do cloud, do it right. Embrace VCF 9.0 and stay on prem.”
• How one midsize enterprise is making VCF work: Broadcom’s shift to all-in-one, perpetual licenses for VMware Cloud Foundation has infuriated customers and priced out some companies, but 750-employee Grinnell Mutual has managed to save money on the new platform.
• Broadcom tackles agentic AI security challenges: Broadcom announced new security enhancements for its VMware vDefend and VMware Avi products, which are part of the VMware Cloud Foundation Cyber Compliance Advanced Services. Upgrades include more security for agentic workflows, including model context protocol (MCP) servers, and support for post-quantum encryption, among other improvements.
• Broadcom and Canonical expand partnership, promising accelerated innovation: The combination of VMware Cloud Foundation and Ubuntu Pro offers enterprise-grade container-based and AI applications.
• Broadcom launches VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence and Tanzu Platform 10.3 to drive agentic AI:Broadcom is pushing its new data lakehouse platform as the answer to all an enterprise’s data challenges — or almost.
• As VMware Explore kicks off, customers are looking for VCF value: Despite grumbling by customers, as well as legal action against Broadcom on a number of fronts, there’s no indication that Broadcom CEO Hock Tan is wavering the least bit from his strategy. Broadcom’s pitch is that VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) enables IT organizations to run a modern, virtualized, high-performance, highly automated, AWS-style cloud in an on-prem environment with all of the benefits that accrue.