VMware has refreshed several major products, created a new AI offering and handed customers “petabytes” of scalable storage, as CEO Raghu Raghuram vows it will infuse its products with AI features to help users better navigate IT complexity.
“It shows the innovation engine is running,” Raghuram told CRN. “It shows mutli-cloud is real. And of course it shows how we are responding to the customer’s AI needs.”
Even with the announcements, Broadcom was the topic du jour for many partners after the company said Monday it would be allowed by statute to close its $61 billion acquisition of VMware on Oct. 30, near the end of its fiscal year.
[RELATED: Broadcom-VMware Deal Approval Comes Amid VMware Partner Renaissance]
The news comes after a year in which Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has said he would “embrace the channel,” not raise prices, and invest $1 billion in VMware’s R&D should the acquisition go through. Tan has also been vocal on earnings calls about Broadcom’s massive potential to win in AI.
“It’s easy and it’s fun to explore the [AI] use cases for each business. The hard part is all the dependencies underneath,” said Chris Woodin, vice president of solutions and alliances at Softchoice, the $2.2 billion solution provider behemoth, No. 31 on the CRN 2023 Solution Provider 500. “Data security. Data governance. The cost of managing all the data that’s going to feed the models, how you maintain the accuracy and the currency of those models. That’s where the hard work is.”
Woodin said Softchoice has seen a ramp-up in data growth in recent months. The task of ensuring the accuracy and security of the data and the models is a massive opportunity, but so is helping customers optimize costs, which is where he sees products like vSAN Plus playing an outsized role.
“When it comes to the efficiency of managing these massive data warehouses, I think VMware is coming in at just the right time to make that possible,” he said.
Michael Bullough, senior systems engineer at VMware partner CompuNet, said many software developers consider it a core utility and are using it to maximize time and efficiency in coding.
“The generative AI announcements are intriguing. It’s definitely the next big frontier in tech. I think a lot of us from the reseller standpoint are waiting to see what big players like VMware are bringing to the market,” he said.
But it isn’t only AI offerings that VMware is delivering.
Here are the biggest announcements that came out Tuesday at VMware Explore 2023.
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O’Ryan Johnson is a veteran news reporter. He covers the data center beat for CRN and hopes to hear from channel partners about how he can improve his coverage and write the stories they want to read. He can be reached at [email protected]..
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