I've spent more than two decades sitting across the table from IT leaders around the world, and one truth remains constant: technology decisions are never really about technology. They are about people trying to keep a promise to their own customers: a bank guaranteeing a transaction, a telco keeping a network up, or an organization promising sovereignty over its most critical workloads. Lately, those promises are getting harder to keep, as enterprises race to put AI models to work inside their business.
Beneath all that AI ambition lies real infrastructure complexity. Most teams are managing a patchwork of legacy systems, multiple vendors, and temporary fixes that were never designed to work together. A challenge that only multiplies as containerized workloads, Kubernetes, and frontier AI models become default requirements. Consider that Broadcom’s recent Private Cloud Outlook 2026 Report highlighted that 38% of enterprise IT leaders in APJ point to Kubernetes operations as their single biggest skills gap.
Against this backdrop, I no longer judge modernization by how many workloads the infrastructure can run. Instead what I look for is whether the strategy is driven by a genuine business need, the chosen platform earns a CIO's trust, and whether the architecture gives developers the freedom to innovate while giving leadership complete operational and data sovereignty. The best way to demonstrate what that trust looks like is with the customers who are proving it every day.
Samsung Electronics: Maximizing Developer Agility and Simplifying Kubernetes Operations by Running VMs and Containers on a Unified Private Cloud Platform
Inside Samsung Electronics’ cloud platform team, engineers spent too much energy standing up the basics, such as wiring together Virtual Machines (VMs), Load Balancers (LBs), and Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) before a single developer could start building anything. However, by adopting VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and automating the infrastructure control plane, the team streamlined cluster orchestration and established an environment where internal development teams could easily access vital cluster-scoped resources, such as Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs). By moving to dedicated clusters built on our platform, Samsung Electronics gave every team the freedom to manage and upgrade their environment, on their own schedule, without waiting on anyone else.
What makes Samsung Electronics’ approach stand out is that they didn't just patch a problem— they reengineered how their internal teams should experience infrastructure entirely. This infrastructure modernization served as a critical stepping stone toward securing the agility and control of a software-defined private cloud architecture. Samsung Electronics is now scaling that foundation with real confidence, and it's set to carry them into the next wave of AI, design, and manufacturing workloads.
Vodafone Idea Limited: Overcoming Supply Chain Bottlenecks and Slashing Chipset Costs by up to 40% with VKS
Another great customer example is Vodafone Idea Limited which runs VMs and containers on a unified private cloud platform. To support its nationwide 5G rollout—reaching 220 million customers across 133 cities—and modernize its critical CRM, billing, and inventory systems, Vodafone Idea launched its 'Pragati Transformation Project.' Built on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VKS, the project unifies workloads across its environments.
During deployment, global hardware supply chain disruptions and a 200% spike in hardware costs threatened to delay the project. By leveraging VKS, Vodafone bypassed these hurdles, creating independent, isolated kubernetes clusters within existing vSphere environments managed by partners. This separated software delivery timelines from underlying hardware constraints, allowing Vodafone Idea to deploy large production workloads, including 195 billing pods across eight namespaces, and saving three months on the transformation timeline.
Today, Vodafone Idea expects to slash chipset costs by 30-40% using more NVMe infrastructure to offset the costs of expensive storage. This strategy improves infrastructure utilization by 30% and accelerates provisioning timelines by over 60%. Ultimately, it delivers a highly secure, AI-ready platform capable of sustaining rapid growth within budget. That's the kind of story that stays with me as I meet customers across the region. This is a team that refused to let a supply chain crisis become a customer-facing failure, maintaining full control over their deployment roadmap and coming out the other side stronger than before.
Taiwan’s Leading Banks: Speed Without Regulatory Compromise
In Taiwan’s financial sector, regulatory oversight is amongst the most stringent in the world. For institutions like Taishin Bank and First Commercial Bank, compliance, data residency, and operational resilience are non-negotiable. When both banks moved to unify their virtual machines and containerized workloads on a single private cloud platform, the objective was clear: accelerate digital services without compromising governance. Service provisioning workflows that previously took weeks of manual orchestration now take just hours. Most importantly, both institutions achieved this agility while maintaining total data sovereignty and satisfying their regulatory requirements. They proved that in banking, innovation and control do not have to be mutually exclusive.
Investing in an Architecture You Can Trust
If there is one common thread that connects Samsung Electronics, Vodafone Idea, and Taiwan's leading banks, it isn't the technology stack. None of them modernized because they wanted infrastructure that could run more workloads. They modernized because they wanted sovereignty, choice and control over their data and an architecture they could trust. In every case, that trust was built on the same underlying decision: moving away from siloed environments and onto a single, unified private cloud platform capable of supporting VMs, containers, and AI workloads. To all our customers and partners embarking on this journey: thank you for trusting us with your infrastructure and partnering with us to modernize it for the future.