A lot has changed since Broadcom acquired VMware. With the launch of VCF 9, it's safe to say that VMware's strategy entirely revolves around VMware Cloud Foundation. We sit down with Prashanth Shenoy, CMO and VP Marketing for VMware Cloud Foundation at Broadcom, to explore how VCF has become the cornerstone of VMware's product strategy under Broadcom ownership. Shenoy offers candid insights into the company's business model transformation and future direction, particularly regarding AI integration and its hybrid cloud strategy. We also ask the hard questions about the choices Broadcom made and the effect it has on mid-market and smaller customers.

We dive deep into how VMware's flagship platform (VCF) has evolved to meet the changing demands of modern enterprises.

Shenoy pulls back the curtain on Broadcom's strategic realignment of VMware's sprawling portfolio, which once included a staggering 9,000 SKUs, so complex that partners needed six months of training to create customer proposals. The simplification strategy centers on three key pillars: transitioning to a subscription model, consolidating the product portfolio around VCF as the central platform, and standardizing go-to-market approaches to ensure consistency across all customer touchpoints.

For organizations struggling to determine where to place their workloads, VCF now offers unprecedented flexibility with a "buy once, deploy anywhere" model that spans on-premises environments, colocation facilities, cloud service providers, and hyperscaler infrastructure. Shenoy states that 70% of enterprises are now considering or actively repatriating workloads from public cloud environments due to concerns over cost transparency, security considerations, and data sovereignty requirements. Particularly as AI initiatives move from pilot to production.

The integration of private AI capabilities directly into VCF represents a significant strategic advantage, allowing organizations to maintain control over their proprietary data while leveraging the full power of generative AI. This development, coupled with VCF's unified platform for both traditional VM and containerized Kubernetes workloads, positions it as the foundation for the next generation of enterprise applications.

Discover how VMware Cloud Foundation can help you build a modern private cloud with the security, control, and cost predictability your organization demands while enabling cutting-edge AI and Kubernetes workloads at scale. Listen to Techzine Talks!

Harry Reid International Airport is a special airport, with some very specific needs. The network infrastructure is very important. That makes it possible to offer travelers a good experience, from curb to gate. During HPE Discover, we sat down with Rishma M. Khimji, the airport's Chief Information and Technology Officer, to talk about how special it is exactly.

Harry Reid International Airport is the largest largest 100% common-use airport in the United States. That means that Khimji and her team have a lot of control over its infrastructure and what runs on it. That's a good thing, because that means they can go for a unified approach, from gate assignments to passenger flow, without being constrained by airline-specific systems that plague other major hubs.

At the core of the airport is an extensive HPE infrastructure featuring over 3,000 HPE Aruba access points delivering connectivity throughout the terminals. This network does more than just provide free Wi-Fi; it also generates valuable analytics about passenger movement patterns. That's very valuable data for things like retail placement, bottleneck reduction, and service enhancements. The airport's segmented network architecture ensures casino gaming operations remain completely separate from other systems.

As Khimji explains, "The airport is the first and last look of the city." It should reflect that in terms of what travelers can do and experience. Listen to this new episode how Harry Reid International Airport does this and how it intends to do that in the future. 

Browsers have become an endpoint, and have also become an attack vector and target for attackers. The problem is that your EDR isn't keeping up. In this conversation with Vivek Ramachandran, founder and CEO of SquareX, we dive deep into the emerging world of Browser Detection and Response (BDR) and why it matters for modern security teams.

Drawing from his 24 years in cybersecurity, Ramachandran explains why traditional security approaches are failing to protect the browser. The browser has effectively become an application platform rather than just a simple web viewer, so it is important to protect it. "EDRs currently have zero visibility into the browser," Ramachandran notes. "They primarily look at file and process, but by looking at a browser's memory, it's almost impossible to reconstruct what is happening at the application layer."

This blind spot creates vulnerabilities as organizations move to cloud-native operations, Ramachandran says. While SASE and SSE solutions claim to secure browser traffic, they introduce latency and are easily circumvented by modern attack techniques like "last mile reassembly," where attackers create malicious files entirely client-side, invisible to cloud inspection.

According to Ramachandran, Squarex takes a different approach from "enterprise browsers" that create user friction. Instead, BDR works with existing browsers through extensions, using WebAssembly to run detection algorithms at near-native speeds within the browser context. This provides complete visibility into attack chains and protects corporate identities, one of the primary targets nowadays.

Whether browser security emerges as a standalone category or becomes integrated into existing security tools, remains to be seen. Ramachandran is adamant that browsers represent an under-protected attack surface that needs immediate attention. Listen now to learn more about how "shifting up, not left" is necessary according to him and SquareX.

Work feels broken. We're drowning in too many systems, endless context switching, and information scattered across countless platforms. But what if the solution isn't adding another tool, but transforming one you already use into the glue that binds everything together?

In this conversation with Peter Dooling, Chief Customer Officer at Slack, we explore how Slack is evolving from a messaging platform into what they call a "work operating system." Dooling reveals how customer feedback has shaped Slack's transformation, particularly the groundbreaking "Salesforce Channels" that connect Salesforce's structured data records with the rich contextual conversations happening in Slack.

For organizations concerned that Slack may become too Salesforce-centric, Dooling stresses its commitments to open integration. Their approach to enterprise search stands apart from competitors, he further states. Rather than pulling you away from your workflow, Slack aims to federate searches across your systems while maintaining strict security protocols, bringing information to you instead of making you hunt for it.

And then there's Slack's understanding of communication patterns. Their Huddles feature serves a fundamentally different purpose than traditional video conferencing, Dooling states. It is designed for those quick, contextual conversations that drive business forward. 

Looking ahead, Slack's three-pronged AI strategy wants to transform work: Slack AI enhances the core platform's intelligence, Salesforce Agent integration brings specialized AI assistants into channels, and an open ecosystem supports third-party AI applications. Throughout it all, Slack's core philosophy remains focused on capturing and maintaining attention. That's the scarcest resource in our distracted work lives.

The announcement of Oracle Database@AWS during last year's Oracle CloudWorld came as quite a shock to many people. Recently, this new offering by Oracle and Amazon Web Services (AWS) became generally available. 

We had a comprehensive discussion with Oracle VP of Mission Critical Database Technologies Ashish Ray about what this offering means for Oracle, but more importantly also for joint AWS and Oracle customers. 

Is it a new milestone in cloud database architecture? And will it deliver on its promises of unprecedented performance and integration capabilities? Listen to the discussion we had with Ray to hear his answers to these and many other questions.

VM replacement has gotten very real over the past couple of years. During KubeCon earlier this year we had a chat about this with Venkat Ramakrishnan, VP and GM for Portworx at Pure Storage. How are organizations responding to market disruptions in virtualization?

The days of tire-kicking Kubernetes and containers are firmly behind us. Today's enterprise customers are running tens of thousands of Kubernetes nodes in production environments. Some of them operate over 250,000 containers simultaneously. This shift coincides with significant pricing changes in the VMware ecosystem following Broadcom's acquisition. It creates what Ramakrishnan calls "a compelling event" that's accelerating containerization journeys.

Migrate or modernize?

Organizations need to decide: will they migrate to another VM-based platform or are they going to modernize with Kubernetes? Many are choosing the latter, Ramakrishnan tells us. They recognize that if retraining is necessary anyway, it makes more sense to invest in learning a platform representing the future of infrastructure. A platform like KubeVirt enables developers to run VMs and containers side-by-side on Kubernetes. This is important, as it provides a unified control plane that eliminates the need for separate teams with distinct skillsets.

That said, not all workloads will move to containers. Legacy applications with significant "code gravity" will continue running as VMs for the foreseeable future. Organizations need the tools and platforms to manage this hybrid reality effectively. 

With proper planning and the right partners, replatforming is achievable for enterprises of all sizes. The idea is that this gives them the foundations to support innovation for decades to come while gaining the flexibility to operate across any cloud environment. 

Listen to this new Techzine Talks episode now!

Amazon S3 is the oldest service in the catalogue of Amazon Web Services (AWS). We sat down with Andy Warfield, Distinguished Engineer at AWS, to talk about the 19-year journey of Amazon S3 from simple backup solution to sophisticated data foundation.

Warfield talks about how S3 began as essentially "a storage locker across town" for archival purposes, before customers discovered its REST architecture made it capable of handling massive parallel workloads. This unexpected advantage fueled S3's growth beyond unstructured data into analytics and AI domains. The introduction of columnar formats like Parquet and open table formats like Iceberg transformed what was possible, culminating in AWS's recent launch of S3 Tables.

Besides the general direction Amazon S3 has taken and takes, we also talk about other challenges related to current developments. One of them is how AWS and Amazon S3 handles the bloat that is associated with vectorizing databases for use in AI use cases. This challenge is driving significant innovation at AWS to optimize storage for the AI era.

All in all, Amazon S3 has had to evolve continuously to mirror the broader developments in how businesses approach data - from static archives to dynamic, queryable assets powering real-time decision making. 

The final topic we talk about is the future of Amazon S3. Warfield wants it to be "pulled closer to application code" with improved performance and more flexible access methods to ensure customers don't have to choose upfront how they'll use their data.

We are slightly biased of course, but we think this is a very good episode of Techzine Talks, and highly recommend anyone interested in the topic to listen to it. Tune in now!

The cybersecurity landscape has transformed in recent years, with managed security services gaining widespread acceptance as organizations face the realities of today's threat landscape. In this conversation with Erik van Buggenhout, responsible for managed security services at NVISO, we delve into the practical challenges that have made outsourcing security operations a necessity rather than just an option for many businesses.

Erik shares an analogy that illustrates how we should think about cybersecurity: "It's like the brakes on your Ferrari. It gives you the confidence to accelerate because you know you can stop when needed." This perspective shifts security from being viewed as an obstacle to an enabler that allows organizations to move faster while managing risks effectively. That is the idea, at least.

We discuss the fundamental reasons organizations struggle with security basics. Think of things like the proliferation of tools but also the challenges of prioritizing foundational controls like asset management and patch management. Despite vendors' promises of next-generation solutions, many security teams find themselves drowning in alerts while they can't see the forest for the trees.

The conversation also touches on the rapid evolution of AI in cybersecurity. While approximately 75% of security alerts are already handled automatically through simple playbooks, agentic AI presents both tremendous opportunities and significant risks. There's a clear role to play here for the concepts of transparency and explainability, and, as a result, trust. Agent-to-agent interactions will only make this more important.

We also try and be as practical as possible for our listeners. How do you build effective defense-in-depth strategies that combine automation, AI, and human expertise in a layered approach? He challenges the notion that humans are the "weakest link" and instead advocates for creating security controls that users can trust.

Listen to this latest episode of Techzine Talks now!

Smart manufacturing has many facets. There's the convergence of IT and OT, and the security challenges that brings. In recent years we've seen Private 5G coming up, at least as a topic of conversation if not in actual adoption. Finally, the edge environments of those factories recently fell under the spell of AI too. 

At Mobile World Congress earlier this year, we talked to Parm Sandhu, Group Vice President of Enterprise Products and Services at NTT Data, about all of these topics. What does Edge AI bring us and is private 5G finally delivering on years of promises? And what about the security issues associated with the convergence of IT and OT? And finally, how are all these developments interconnected?

Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks now and let us know what you think.

A little bit of a change of pace this week, as we talk about how big technology companies invest in other companies and what underpins their acquisition strategy. During Cisco Live we had the opportunity to sit down with Derek Idemoto, SVP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments. 

The pace at which Cisco launches products and services in the past four to five years is quite stunning. Especially when compared to the rather pedestrian pace at which the company moved forward prior to 2020, the difference is striking.

Cisco's strategy has never been to build everything from scratch, at least not in the past three of its four decades. It has done many acquisitions and also invests in a lot of companies. Sometimes investing turns into acquiring after a while, sometimes it doesn't.

In our chat with Idemoto, we talk about the rationale behind Cisco's approach. We specifically touch on the billion-dollar AI Investment Fund it set up last year. We dive into how Cisco determines when to invest and when to buy, what that means for the rest of the organization, what are some interesting areas of investment at the moment, and much more.

The work that Idemoto and his team are doing is a crucial part of how Cisco operates. It is therefore a crucial part to understand if one is to understand Cisco properly. If only because it means that the statement by Cisco President and CPO Jeetu Patel that Cisco is "the world's largest startup" actually holds water. It can move surprisingly quickly because of all of the investments and acquisitions, even though these also put a strain on the own organization.

Listen to this - in our humble opinion - interesting conversation now.