Broadcom boss Hock Tan says public cloud gave IT departments PTSD

VMware Explore Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has opened the VMware Explore conference by saying CEOs’ decisions to push their companies into public clouds have left their IT departments with post-traumatic stress disorder, while silos of datacenter tech have left tech teams “screwed”.

In Tan’s telling, a decade ago CEOs “fell in love with the promise of public cloud” and directed their IT teams to adopt it. In the years since, users have learned that public clouds are trauma-inducingly costly and complex to operate - and impose further pain by making compliance chores unwieldy.

Tan’s fix for both problems is on-prem IT – running VMware’s Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite, natch.

“The future of the enterprise is private,” he said. “Private cloud, and private AI using your private data.” Tan allowed that public clouds do have a role – as a source of elastic resources to handle spikes in demand or as a place to run VMware’s software.

The CEO admitted that software has contributed to making today’s on-prem tech unwieldy. He said silos of compute, networking, and storage, create unproductive scutwork that slows innovation and leave IT departments “so screwed”.

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Tan and Paul Turner, the vice president of VMware by Broadcom’s Cloud Foundation Division, both admitted VMware must bear some responsibility for screwed-up IT departments because the outfit’s compute, storage and networking products were not well-integrated.

“We didn’t have single sign-on, and we had an independent product lifecycle,” Turner said. Some of those issues will be addressed in the forthcoming VCF 9, also announced today.

Tan said VCF 9 represents VMware by Broadcom’s response to customers’ requests.

“You want our products to work better and be more user friendly,” he said. “You want them to actually work together.”

With a nod to Broadcom’s revised licensing plans and decision to sell only product bundles, Tan told the VMware Explore crowd: “You are going to see change – sorry.”

“We are serious business people. So are you. We are all about business at Broadcom: we are here to run your business more efficiently.”

“We are not here to show you bright shiny objects.”

Public cloud, he suggested, is such a shiny object. VCF is not … or will be once VCF 9 debuts. ®