The omnipresent commitment to Generative Artificial Intelligence has featured in a good part of VMware Explore 2023, which is being held these days in Barcelona. And in some way, it is no wonder. The consulting firm McKinsey assures that in the coming years, the business related to this technology could exceed 4.4 billion euros.
So from this premise, the approximately 9,000 attendees at this year’s edition have had the opportunity to hear how the company’s main executives, with Raghu Raghuram (CEO) at the head, outlined the key aspects of a strategy that involves continuing to deepen the alliances that make it easier for companies to develop private AI, with full control over their data.
If last August the company signed an agreement with NVIDIA, HPE, Dell and Lenovo to bring VMware Private AI to organizations, today announced that it has reached new agreements with Intel and IBM. In the case of Intel, VMware has explained that it will leverage the power of VMware Cloud Foundation and Intel AI hardware accelerators so that companies can perform model inference, without having to deploy these workloads on the GPU, which It can mean more than interesting energy savings. At IBM, the bet is to carry IBM watsonx to on-premises environments, so customers can combine VMware Private AI and Red Hat OpenShift to deploy these Generative AI capabilities.
And why this commitment to make Generative AI private? Firstly, they have assured, due to the uncertainty that currently surrounds the different regulations that orbit around these models. As the president of the company has stated in this regard, Sumit Dhawan, «Although on the one hand clients are eager to explore the possibilities of the IAG, on the other hand, they are not willing to invest millions of dollars if regulators force them to back down in the near future. That is where being able to have control over your own data, in your own CPD makes sense. Secondly, there is also an economic argument: “training and working with these models on premises It represents only 33% of the cost of doing it in the public cloud,” they say.
VMware Sovereign Cloud adds 50 partners
Barcelona has also been the setting chosen by the company to highlight the good work they have done in the last year to bring their sovereign cloud proposal to companies. In that sense, VMware Sovereign Cloud has practically doubled the number of partners, reaching 50 (despite the fact that in Spain at the moment Telefónica remains the only reference) and is growing with new capabilities.
VMware Cloud Sovereign now includes new developer, data, and security services, including integrated data services through VMware Cloud Director and ecosystem partners, and expanded capabilities within developer-centric tools like VMware Tanzu and VMware NSX to enable rapid delivery of applications with precise controls around data flow.
The other environments that have shone in this year’s edition have, first of all, the edgea space in which the multinational has presented different innovations aimed at improving the way in which companies make visible, manage (new versions of Edge Cloud Orchestrator) and secure (VMware SASE clients will be able to use Microsoft Security Copiloy) their connected devices.
And as it could not be otherwise, the increasingly hybrid workplace. In this space, VMware announces advanced automation capabilities and new third-party integrations provided through the platform Anywhere Workspace, improving its support for macOS and giving IT administrators more tools to manage the applications they deploy and the way they implement security policies.
Other interesting developments have been the introduction of VMware Data Services Manager that enables IT departments to consistently and more securely manage data services running on VMware Cloud, or new advancements in VMware Cloud Foundation providing benefits for modern AI/ML and generative AI workloads.
Of course, Broadcom’s shadow is long and this year it has been a little more present than last year, when the event practically coincided with the purchase announcement. Thus, on the main stage we had the opportunity to see its CEO for the first time and in an almost testimonial way, Tan Hock Eng, who assured that accelerating innovation, increasing the partner ecosystem and providing more simplicity and agility to its customers are his priorities for the new stage of VMware. For now, waiting for the decision of the Chinese Government, the die is cast.
