Broadcom wants to party like it's 2005

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Broadcom rolls out new VMware services aimed at convincing customers to run next-generation workloads the old-fashioned way, we're starting to learn what DOGE did with some of the country's most sensitive data, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.

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Virtual reality

It's been nearly two years since Broadcom completed its $61 billion acquisition of VMware, which defined a pre-cloud generation of IT workloads by allowing companies to wring more performance out of their existing investments in data-center infrastructure. Virtualization tech was a true game-changer two decades ago, but an enormous amount of applications have been built around cloud infrastructure services since then.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan urged attendees at the 2025 VMware Explore conference on Tuesday to resist the temptation to modernize older infrastructure deployments through the Big Three cloud providers. His speech comes after a summer of defections from VMware's platform following new, more stringent licensing terms and aggressive pitches from rival infrastructure providers.

• "Most of you continue to be weighed down by legacy infrastructure, and you are afraid to move forward," Tan said, according to The Register. "The answer is not to run straight to public cloud like you did 10 to 15 years ago."
• He said more or less the same thing at VMware Explore in Barcelona last year: "The future of the enterprise is private — private cloud, private AI, fueled by your private data."
• Unfortunately for Tan, recent cloud-provider earnings results suggest that an awful lot of new apps were built on public cloud infrastructure.
• Indeed, one of Microsoft's biggest sources of growth last quarter was VMware customers migrating their applications to Azure, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Still, tech organizations that have chosen the hybrid cloud path are thinking more pragmatically about where and how they deploy new apps, especially when it comes to generative AI apps. Data privacy and cost concerns are high on that list, and VMware unveiled several new additions to VMware Cloud Foundation and its Tanzu software development platform that were designed to give VMware customers cloud-like performance capabilities inside their own data centers.

• VMware added several new AI-oriented features to the latest release of Cloud Foundation, including support for vector databases and a model runtime (!) that "will enable organizations to flexibly deploy AI models across a range of hardware, including AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, without the need to refactor AI applications, optimizing infrastructure utilization," according to a press release.
• Tanzu now supports the data lakehouse architecture, which has transformed the way enterprises store and manage data across cloud services and on-premises storage devices.
• And VMware's security software now understands how to work with MCP servers and AI agents, which the industry hopes will be the building blocks that finally deliver on the promise of enterprise generative AI.

VMware's strategy under Broadcom's ownership feels quite similar to the way IBM has approached the enterprise market over the past several years: Launch just the right number of trendy features that make longtime Fortune 100 customers feel like they are keeping up with the Joneses without having to make wholesale changes.

• For now, that seems to be ok with Tan and Broadcom shareholders, as VMware revenue has grown significantly over the last year since the company rolled out new service bundles that increased prices for most customers.
• But the cloud providers are growing faster on top of an already enormous base, and along with just about every SaaS company on the planet are investing heavily in efforts to establish themselves at the center of generative AI app deployment.
• There is certainly a big market for keeping huge enterprise companies happy, but the startups that will become the big businesses of the 2030s are not building around VMware.

Efficiency!

Charles Borges, the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration [SSA], released a whistle-blower complaint Tuesday that shed more light on the reckless approach to data security and existing federal security practices followed by the DOGE dipshits over the last six months. The complaint validates worries that a small group of arrogant Elon Musk acolytes have operated since January under the belief they can do whatever they want with some of the most sensitive personal information stored by the federal government.

After running into initial roadblocks, DOGE employees were able to convince one-time SSA CIO and DOGE lackey Michael Russo in June to allow them to upload a production copy of more than 450 million Social Security records and applications to an AWS server that lacked any of the oversight usually associated with handling records of this sensitivity. According to the complaint, "the transfer of NUMIDENT data to a production account constructed as outlined in the risk assessment above entails replicating live SSA data on millions of Americans to an environment apparently lacking in independent security controls, including independent tracking of who is accessing the data and how they are using it."

It's not clear what DOGE did with their own unrestricted access to this data, but "Mr. Borges said he was later told that the reason was to improve the way the agency exchanged data with other parts of government," according to The New York Times. Given that noncitizens are allowed to apply for Social Security numbers under certain circumstances and ICE has been given almost unchecked power to detain basically whomever they see fit, a pattern starts to emerge.

Enterprise funding

Crusoe raised a $175 million "credit facility," which it will use to build new data center capacity in Iceland to support its neocloud aspirations.

KnowledgeLake scored a "majority growth investment" of $65 million, and the workflow automation company said it would use that private equity to expand its sales efforts.

Attio landed $52 million in Series B funding for its CRM software, which hopes to take down giants like Salesforce with AI tools.

Seemplicity raised $50 million in Series B funding as it builds out an automated tool that helps companies remediate cybersecurity risks.

OpenLight scored $34 million in Series A funding for its optical interconnect chip technology, which could help data-center operators build faster networking infrastructure for AI applications.

Zed landed $32 million in Series B funding for its AI code editor, which unlike competitors is actually not a fork of MIcrosoft's Visual Studio Code.

The Runtime roundup

Salesforce customers using the third-party Salesloft Drift application were hit with a cyberattack earlier this month targeting Salesforce credentials that the hackers hoped to use to compromise other cloud services, according to Google Cloud.

Both MongoDB and Okta reported quarterly earnings that beat expectations and raised guidance, a sign that enterprise tech spending is doing better than anticipated earlier this year amid the tariff chaos.

Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!