VMware Explore 2025 is in full swing, and it's a moment for reflection on our incredible journey and the exciting path ahead. I can safely say, virtualization revolutionized IT, and vSphere was at the core of that revolution. We fundamentally changed how business operates by standardizing and automating IT with virtualization, but that was just the beginning. The next chapter is the modern private cloud, and the platform of choice is VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
A year ago we announced VCF 9 and we have delivered. It was a huge undertaking from more than 5,000 engineers, more than a million hours, and based on more than 8,000 patents. Delivered in June 2025, VCF 9.0 is more than just a release; it's a fundamental shift for modernizing infrastructure, applications, and security.
With VCF 9.0 as the backdrop, my excitement at Explore this year centers on three key areas:
- Our unprecedented customer momentum
- Our new VCF innovations enabling infrastructure at the speed of developers, advanced cyber resilience and, secure AI workloads
- The critical role our strategic ecosystem partners play in helping us deliver the modern private cloud
Unprecedented Momentum: Our Customers' Success is the Story
The momentum behind VMware Cloud Foundation has surpassed our own expectations. We’re proud that nine of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies and 87% of our 10,000 largest customers are adopting VCF, with more than 100 million cores licensed worldwide. At Explore 2025, dozens of customers will share their VCF journeys. I'm particularly inspired by stories like:
- ChristianaCare: This leading healthcare provider modernized its IT infrastructure with VCF, reducing system complexity, accelerating digital innovation, and bolstering regulatory compliance. VCF 9.0 promises further decreased cloud costs, enhanced data accessibility and security, and streamlined operations for more efficient care delivery.
- Grinnell Mutual: This property and casualty insurer is transforming its private cloud infrastructure with VCF, driving enhanced agility, efficiency, and security. VCF has unified traditionally separate IT teams—Network, Systems, DevOps, DBA, and Desktop Automation—on a single platform, fostering collaboration and accelerating innovation.
- New Belgium Brewing Company: This prominent craft brewery is evolving to a modern private cloud with VCF to drive cost efficiencies and support business continuity. With the integrated VCF 9.0 platform, they anticipate significant improvements in IT operations and will leverage VCF's built-in security capabilities for compliance and security by default.
These stories underscore VCF’s transformative power, enabling organizations to achieve agility, efficiency, and resilience while controlling their destiny in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. At Explore 2025, we are unveiling innovations that will propel VCF into a new era, fundamentally changing how enterprises consume and deliver IT services.
VMware Cloud Foundation: The AI-Native Platform
A major announcement I’m particularly excited about is that VMware Private AI Services will become a standard component of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0. This makes VCF truly AI native. VMware Private AI Services is a comprehensive suite of native AI capabilities designed to enhance privacy and security, simplify infrastructure, and streamline model deployment for enterprise AI. Our VCF customers will be entitled to these services as part of their VCF 9.0 subscription, beginning in Broadcom’s Q1 FY26.
From my perspective, "AI-native" means embedding crucial AI capabilities directly into the core infrastructure. For our customers, this delivers a unified, secure, and scalable platform for both their AI and traditional workloads, eliminating the need for additional purchases. It simplifies infrastructure, streamlines model deployment, and enables them to offer AI as a governed and secure service within their private cloud, from fine-tuning to inference.
Infrastructure at the Speed of Developers
Developers expect IT infrastructure to be ready on demand. So what if developers got autonomy, and IT stayed in control? With VCF, developers get the velocity they need, and business maintains security, confidentiality and trust. We’re introducing innovations to further accelerate developer productivity. VMware vSAN will natively support an S3-compatible interface, allowing unstructured data storage directly on vSAN. This simplifies unified storage policies and will significantly boost developer productivity with multi-tenant, self-service access. VCF will also streamline secure app delivery by embedding GitOps, using Git as the source of truth, with Argo CD automating consistent, auditable deployments. Istio Service Mesh will provide zero-trust networking and rich observability for container communication. All these innovations are designed to free development teams to focus on applications, not infrastructure.
Elevating Cyber Resilience and Compliance
Security and compliance are, to me, non-negotiable, especially as AI workloads proliferate. Today we’re launching the new VCF Advanced Cyber Compliance solution. This Advanced Service provides the trusted runtime, secure databases, application and container images, with the disaster recovery necessary to fully protect your environment in case of compromise, and a monthly proactive assessment report to enhance your security profile.
It is designed for customers in highly-regulated environments who need increased cyber-risk governance and automated compliance management at scale. It will be particularly beneficial for organizations in finance, healthcare, and government, where stringent compliance and robust cyber resilience are paramount. However, any enterprise looking to enhance security, simplify compliance, and protect against sophisticated threats—especially with the growing adoption of AI workloads—will gain immense value.
Powering the Future Through Strategic Ecosystem Collaboration
Our commitment to customer choice and innovation is rooted in strong partnerships. Since Broadcom acquired VMware, we have focused on a smaller set of key technology relationships that we believe will deliver the most comprehensive and flexible solutions for our customers.
Our collaboration with Canonical is a prime example. Broadcom and Canonical are announcing an expanded partnership to help customers ship modern container-based and AI applications faster and more securely. This brings together Canonical’s trusted open-source software, including Ubuntu, with VMware Cloud Foundation to deliver a more secure, developer-ready infrastructure.
Our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA brings support for NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs — including NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Server Edition GPUs — and NVIDIA networking. We are also collaborating with AMD to enable customers to leverage VCF with AMD ROCm™ Enterprise AI software and AMD Instinct™ MI350 Series GPUs, providing great choice and performance for LLM fine-tuning, RAG workflows, and inference. These partnerships ensure that VCF customers have unparalleled flexibility and performance for their most demanding AI workloads.
The Modern Private Cloud: Built for Your Innovation
Twenty-five years ago, when we introduced server virtualization, people thought we were crazy. "Why would you want to share a server?" Yet our visionary customers transformed server economics forever. Then we extended virtualization to networking and storage, with automation, and delivered the software-defined data center. Now, we stand at the next inflection point: the Modern Private Cloud – an agile, secure, and cost-efficient cloud for all applications, deployable anywhere.
And once again, I believe our customers are at the forefront as architects of the future, redefining IT and writing the data center's next chapter.