“Deliver the trusted foundation to accelerate innovation.” This is not just a tagline; it’s the guiding principle that has fueled VMware’s journey. It’s not merely a slogan; it’s a mantra, a purpose that drives every action and innovation. This resounding mission compels us to provide groundbreaking solutions that fuel creativity and push the boundaries of innovation within your reach. It’s why we delivered innovations for the multi-cloud era, designed to enable you to use any technology, any application type, to achieve your business goals while protecting your need for better security, privacy, and trust.
The challenges posed by the multi-cloud landscape are growing more formidable by the day. The demand for speed, security, scalability, privacy controls, and control itself is escalating. As technology races forward, we continue to uphold our promise to you.
And now arrives a revolutionary force – the realm of AI, with GenAI leading the charge. This technology has the potential to supercharge your innovation capacity, extracting immense value from existing data sources and revolutionizing customer interactions. However, we can only take these strides if we can harness this power while accessing our private multi-cloud data sources and the applications that go with them.
Welcome to the era of VMware Private AI.
During this week’s Technology Innovation Showcase, we shared a ton of new tech to position yourself for success in this quickly evolving landscape. The spotlight was on demonstrations, an immersive journey into the heart of the technology enabling this next wave of innovation for you. During the intro, I declared (or warned, depending on how you look at it) that my co-presenters and I were going to “get geeky” with the tech — and from all accounts, we did not disappoint.
Amanda Blevins, our vice president and Americas CTO, began by recapping multi-cloud evolutions from our solution keynotes. Amanda covered VMware Cloud Foundation 5, NSX+, Tanzu Insights, Tanzu Guardrails, and Digital Employee Experience (DEX). These innovations provide more scalability, streamline lifecycle management, expedite deployments and upgrades, reinforce security, and deliver advanced ransomware protection. The spotlight then shifted to instilling trust into distributed workloads and the edge. We unveiled the Confidential Computing Certifier Framework Service, an open-source initiative establishing a unified operational model across diverse chipsets. Additionally, we showcased the GitOps-based fleet-scale management for thin edge environments with VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator built on Project Keswick.
But we were only just getting started. From there, we shared how we are once again focused on accelerating your ability to use the latest technologies while retaining simplicity, control, and the ability to leverage your existing multi-cloud investments. VMware Private AI had arrived on the main stage.
Or, more accurately, Chris Wolf, VP of VMware AI Labs, arrived on stage to showcase everything you need to deliver the full benefit of AI and GenAI at a level of cost and risk you probably thought was not possible.
With strong metrics, he underlined the potency of AI workloads within VMware and unveiled simple routes for leveraging existing investments. He showcased a demo of the AI-Ready Platform from NVIDIA and VMware before bringing in the rest of the AI ecosystem, revealing our VMware Private AI Reference Architecture, which balances the business gains of AI with the privacy and compliance needs of the organization.
The reference architecture came alive as we seamlessly deployed an LLM on-prem within VMware Cloud Foundation, integrating it with key 3rd party open-source software offerings such as Ray, Pytorch, and Kubeflow. The ease, speed, and resource efficiency defied the expectations of many.
For those not yet in the know, the open-source Ray is to AI/ML workloads as Kubernetes is to containers. To reinforce this, we heard from Robert Nishihara, a co-founder of Ray and now Founder and CEO of Anyscale, who delved into the strength and significance of the announced partnership with VMware.
Chris then demonstrated the tangible potential of LLMs in private environments, highlighting Hugging Face’s SafeCoder on VMware Private AI Foundation. This new, fine-tuned coding assistant provides better code completions and code generation through natural language software development across 80 programming languages. The collaboration between VMware and Hugging Face enables SafeCoder to run on-premises, tuning against customers’ code repositories while safeguarding data confidentiality and privacy. Internal usage of SafeCoder within VMware yielded remarkable results, with 93% of pilot participants committed to its continued utilization.
At this point, we’d covered seven demos and an abundance of content… but our time on stage was far from over.
Returning to the stage, it was time for me to focus on the administrators, operators, platform engineers, and workspace engineers who are the driving force behind making these technologies work for businesses. While the merits of AI are undeniable, we know there are dark sides too. I had already called out our focus on ethics and sustainability, but another area of risk is that the power of AI can be used by bad actors to create new threat vectors constantly. How do we beat AI… with AI?
I then shared how VMware’s generative AI-based feature, Intelligent Assist, which will be part of solutions such as Tanzu,, NSX, and Workspace ONE, will simplify operations, provide real-time knowledge, and help detect and mitigate threats. And it’s all achieved with a judicious blend of automation and human control through the ease of a conversational cloud management interface designed to help everyone thrive as AI lands across all businesses.
The Technology Innovation Showcase wasn’t just a whirlwind of demos, videos, and slides brimming with tech innovations, revelations, and partnerships. I was thrilled to be able to share these innovations with our customers and partners. After all, it’s not every day that you get a front-row seat to witness a sweeping industry change and an up-close look at the next wave of innovation. It was a chance for everyone in the room to jointly “geek out” on some really cutting-edge tech, and “geek out” we did.
Until me meet again in Barcelona—let’s keep pushing the boundaries of innovation—together.
