VMware Explore 2025: VCF 9, Developer Tribes, and the Future of Private Cloud – with Steven Dickens

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All right, this is the second podcast in two weeks. I'm beardless this podcast, if you are listening to this on audio. With me, I have a familiar face, a former colleague, but current peer, another solopreneur. Stephen Dickens, welcome back to the show, founder of Hyperframe Research. How's business, my friend? It's good, man, it's good. Good to see you this week. Always honored to jump on a podcast with you. Really enjoy our conversations. We managed to grab a coffee at VMware Explore.

Good to connect. Business is good. Crazy travel schedule between now and AWS reInvent. But apart from that, just all good, man. All good, see you. Aren't you on the whole switching out the iPhone for, is it a Lenovo device? Yeah, yeah, so they've sent me a Motorola Razr, which is really cool. Yes, I am sort of documenting my personal journey around trying to get off of Apple products. Largely failing at the moment, but still trying to get there.

Yeah, good luck with that. I'm literally, after we get out of this, I'll probably launch an EC2 instance of Mac OS and AWS once we get out of this. I'm all in, I'm all in on the Mac. Oh, okay, I love it. So speaking of VMware Explore, one big thing that came from the show was developers. So Steven, the first question I have for you is one that the media has been asking me. And I don't think the media quite gets it.

So I would love to get your impression. Is VMware going to be able to sell VCF9 to developers? So I think if you go up 50,000 foot, I remember going to VMware Analyst events. I came away with the perception that the company was bloated, that there was too many leaders, not enough focus on products, too many product SKUs, a product strategy that I struggle to understand. You wind forward to where I am today, I understand what they're doing. I understand why they're doing it.

I understand what their sort of clarity around the product message is. I think they've got a corporate opinion. They have made it easier for customers to buy and they've made it easier for channel partners to sell. So I think, you know, that's my 50,000 foot view, but I didn't answer your question. You see, you notice how I did that. I said something. That was classic. That was, you know, I've seen you on Bloomberg TV. I've seen you on the programs and you're a pro at this.

Yeah, I said some really intelligent sounding things without answering your question, but I know I've got to get back to it because you'll hold me to account. Those shows typically don't. So can they sell this to developers? I think that's where the jury's out a bit more for me. We got a lot of updates about Tanzu. We got a lot of updates about how the Kubernetes piece is moving and the cloud native piece is moving from Tanzu into VCF9. I had a really interesting conversation with the Broadcom team around the level of contribution and engagement with open source communities, which is kind of where the developers live.

They've been to the last two KubeCons and are planning to go to that event. And I got into a fascinating conversation with them about what is their sticker game. And I'll explain what I mean, because I think it's an indicator of how developer focused a company is. We've all been to these shows. We've all seen the hoodie wearing people with stickers covered over their laptops. I get to go to KubeCon and there's this community day on day zero. It's people contributing to open source projects.

There's little sort of pop-up booths with people giving out swag. VMware's got to flex that muscle for me to speak to developers. I described it to the people I was chatting to, their sticker game. And I care less about whether VCF9's got a sticker or not, but you need to build a tribe. You need to build community. And that manifests itself as people putting stickers on their laptops. It's a lot more than that, obviously. It's a whole ecosystem.

It's a whole sort of identity. We see people tattooing red hats onto their body. We see people sort of, and I'm not saying that people need to tattoo a Broadcom logo to their body, but it's an extreme manifestation of people feeling that they're part of a community. That's how developers roll. VMware's not there yet. Hawk mentioned the VM user group in his keynote. I got a chance to speak to one of those, a few of those guys on the board in one of the bars.

VMware took me over to chat to them. I think there's breadcrumbs there and there's sort of good indicators. They got to turn that up to 11 for me. One of the things that really caught my attention during the day one keynote, they talked about the golden path and platforming for developers and making it easy for them to select VCF9 and selecting a database that's already IT approved, et cetera. And my curiosity went straight out the roof because I'm like, well, wow, someone in infrastructure actually has to curate that experience for that to happen.

So one of the things that we've talked about, the last time I attended an analyst event, I asked Hawk, what is the plan for what I perceive is the biggest blocker for VCF9 adoption? And that's governance. While VCF9 has, in my opinion, come out to be a very good technical solution, it's a solid private cloud, probably the best if not one of the best private cloud solutions on the market. However, organizations are not fled enough to adopt VCF9. Was there any talk around how customers are rejiggering their organizations for the governance shot that is adopting the entire stack?

Yes, I mean, the VMware team got me checked into a client who runs the ports in Antwerp and runs a network of sort of ports. Fascinating discussion, Brent Ellis and I sort of had a chance to chat with this guy. If you know Brent, probably one of the best infrastructure analysts out there. So we had a really sort of fascinating half an hour conversation with this guy. And he talked about his adoption of VCF, not only just for virtual machines, but also for Kubernetes.

The team had looked at Kubernetes and were looking to evaluate, I won't say the name of the product, from a competitor to VMware. And by the time they've got that competitor to be able to show up and do a POC, they'd already implemented VMware VCF9 and were off and running. So I think there's a lot in this adoption story. Hawk spent a lot of time in his analyst session with us talking about adoption. That sort of manifests itself for me in a lot of ways.

The way they've got rid of the VMware Professional Services Organization, rolled that out into the channel and then put credits in place. So if you sign a deal with Broadcom, you'll get the 10% of the value of that deal in implementation credits that go to the channel partner that sold you the deal. It's a real sort of good flywheel about adoption. Yeah, so I got a chance to talk to some of the largest partners that are benefiting from this 10% rolling out VCF9 boots on the ground.

They had a very interesting perspective of the journey. One, they said it's a three-year term. It is year one, installing VCF9. 2, which is the last version of VCF, to VCF9. I don't know how that math works out, but the VCF... We got a pause on that. 2, we're gonna skip 6, 7, and 8, and we're gonna go to 9. I'm like, I don't understand the rationale. If you're in the weeds, last version of vSphere was vSphere 8.

So VCF9 is the new product. So VCF is the new focus of the product. So VCF9. But the partner was telling me the big holdup has been the customer side, is when you install the next version of your VMware platform, you're installing VCF9. And one of the tricks behind the numbers is that when you install, when you go to upgrade vSphere, it by default installs VCF9. So all of the components are there. Whether you're using the components or not is irrelevant.

Technically, Broadcom has gotten another VCF9 customer to implement the bits. Now, are they using the bits? That is where I got into a larger conversation with the partner. And the partner said their biggest challenge is getting these customers to meet with them to start the governance part of it, the flattening of the organization, of getting the networking teams, the storage teams, the compute teams, the security teams to work together to adopt the technology in an effective way so that they can, again, have the deliver, the developer experience that's looking to be delivered.

So it's a really interesting thing. I love the fact that you went to the analyst track and kind of got the official word from Broadcom. And I went from the ground up and talking to the boots on the ground because I think we're filling in some holes for people who are kind of looking at this from the outside. What else, if anything else, stood out for you from the analyst sessions? So we've not talked about Tanzu yet. Obviously, the Kubernetes functionality has been moved from Tanzu back into VCF.

That's movement. I think there's some work to do with Tanzu. It's basically Pivotal plus Spring back to where it kind of almost was. So the kind of two or three years of investment they had in trying to make Tanzu equal Kubernetes in people's mind, it doesn't anymore. The Kubernetes functionalities in VCF. The other piece that came across was the data intelligence platform in Tanzu. I don't know whether, they didn't mention it in many of the sessions, but the lady who looks after the Tanzu business unit talked us through it.

I'm gonna get the name wrong. I think it's Greenplum, but they had bought a database and a lake house type functionality. It really been sitting kind of largely on the shelf is the impression I got. And they're now trying to reinvigorate that and invest in that to create a Tanzu data intelligence platform. She positioned it as Snowflake on-prem. That's a big lift. There's some really strong competitors in that data lake house space. You've got the cloud areas and the Teradatas.

You've got the MongoDBs that are also coming into that space. And then obviously you've got Databricks and Snowflake. Plus obviously you've got a bunch of data lake house capabilities in the public cloud providers as well. So that's gonna be a big lift. They've probably got an installed base. They're probably gonna get heard. Have they got the brand permission and the ability to sales execute a data lake house story? Yeah, there's definitely some work to do. And I think one of the gaps between Tanzu and OpenShift, the dominant developer platform on the market today for private cloud, has been this focus on services in the developer experience.

What can I get out of the box with the solution? And where VMware has an opportunity is this whole coding path perspective. If I deploy something like an OpenShift that has opinions on what should I use for storage? What should I use for DB? What should I use for native networking? And I don't have to make that decision. I can just use what's there. Then that gives you a leg up from a competitive advantage. So I think the data lake question kind of answers itself.

Who's gonna use this solution? People who provide this as a golden opinionated golden path. Like I don't think the conversation or the debate is around Databricks or Snowflakes or this VMware solution. It is, what is the developer's default goading path? And if I get my platform team to select this VMware solution first, then it's a win. Amazing times coming forward. com. com. thectoadvisor to ask questions. Steve, anything you wanna plug before we wrap up? No, just always good to be on a podcast with you, man.

Appreciate it. Always a pleasure to have the opportunity to chat to you. And as I say, like, subscribe, Keith's content. He's got one of the best platforms for that practitioner audience and really gives looks to get behind it. So click and subscribe to whatever Keith's suggesting. And hey, people know where to find me. So please engage. Happy to carry on the conversation.