VMware Moves at the Speed of the Developer, Not the CIO
I’m writing this from Las Vegas at VMware Explore 2025, where the messaging has crystallized around a shift I’ve been tracking for years: VMware no longer moves at the speed of the CIO. Instead, they’re aligning with the speed of the developer.
This isn’t just a marketing pivot—it reflects the tension that’s always existed between IT operations and application development. CIOs are tasked with risk avoidance: keeping systems secure, resilient, and available. Developers, meanwhile, live in the world of immediate business need. The faster they can ship, the better they serve the business.
VMware is leaning into this divide by shifting complexity away from the developer and onto the operator. For anyone who has built private or hybrid clouds, this pattern is familiar. The new twist is VMware’s packaging of this complexity into VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9).
Here’s the nuance:
If you’ve already built the processes and technology to support a private or hybrid cloud, you may not see VCF 9 as compelling. Migrating from one mature technology stack to another is rarely in your best interest.
But if you’re an organization still striving to reach that level of operational maturity, VMware’s value proposition is clear. They’re offering a consistent model that abstracts developer needs and hands the operational responsibility back to infrastructure teams.
And yet, this isn’t a technology problem. It’s a silo problem. The tooling exists, whether VMware’s or others. The real challenge is cultural and organizational: can enterprises align operations, development, and business goals around a consistent model?
For VMware, the bet is simple: if they can reduce friction for developers while standardizing operations for CIOs, they become the connective tissue in the enterprise cloud journey.
The keynote at VMware Explore 2025 suggests that they’re all-in on this path. The question is whether enterprises can evolve at the same speed as their developers—and whether CIOs are ready to give up some control in the process.