Kyndryl, Broadcom expand partnership to push private clouds for AI work

Kyndryl and Broadcom on Thursday rolled out new consulting services for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), tweaking the initiative to be an AI program and pledging to invest in the skills development of several thousand certified Kyndryl consultants, architects, and delivery specialists to enable agentic workflows.

“Against the backdrop of rising sovereignty demands, enterprises are rationalizing their hybrid and private cloud environments, and they require a pragmatic, outcome-driven approach,” said Giovanni Carraro, global strategic alliances leader at Kyndryl, in a news release. “By expanding our partnership with Broadcom and investing in VCF skills, we will help customers build modern, resilient, private clouds that enable AI adoption, support data modernization, address the risk of AI-identified vulnerabilities and deliver real business value.”

Analysts and consultants said the partnership expansion was fairly mundane in itself, but they did think there was meaningful potential in the consultant program.

Mike Leone, a VP/principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, thought that the significant part of the partnership is in the skills investment.

“Enterprises moved onto VCF pretty quickly, and now they’re at the harder stage of actually modernizing it,” he said. “More companies than you think have lost their deep VMware talent, so that work stalls out. Broadcom putting real money behind training a few thousand Kyndryl consultants is a direct answer to that.”

He noted that it isn’t glamorous, but delivery capacity is usually what decides whether a platform gets used well. “Kyndryl’s a logical partner for it too,” he said. “They already run a huge amount of VMware for customers, so this resources a relationship that was already there.”

But Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, questioned how much is really new with this announcement. 

“This is neither a new alliance nor a new platform. Kyndryl and VMware expanded their partnership in November 2021, and managed-services status followed in August 2023, so the relationship is old and the packaging is new,” Gogia pointed out. “What has been announced is scaffolding: consulting, certification, and managed operations built around VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1, with no disclosed financial commitment, no exclusivity, and no named launch customer.”

Gogia said this shows strong interest in private clouds from these two vendors, but he questioned how much enterprise interest exists today in private clouds.

 “No broad enterprise migration from public cloud back to private cloud is visible, and this announcement does not establish that one is needed,” Gogia said. “The defensible reading is selective workload placement. The announcement does not prove that enterprises must shift to private cloud, it proves that Broadcom and Kyndryl want a larger role when enterprises decide where workloads run.”

Justin Greis, CEO of consulting firm Acceligence, disagreed, and said that he found the announcement interesting, “because they are trying to make that private portion of the equation behave more like cloud rather than simply resurrecting the old corporate data center. Automation, policy as code, container support, developer experience, AI inference and agent governance are all part of that proposition.”

However, he said that the boost in personnel is potentially significant. 

“I think the investment in thousands of trained Kyndryl people may ultimately be more consequential than some of the technology language in the announcement,” Greis noted. “Enterprise infrastructure is already incredibly complicated. Add AI agents, multiple models, new governance requirements and hybrid infrastructure, and the skills required to operate all of it become a major constraint. Technology vendors can build increasingly sophisticated platforms, but enterprises still need people capable of turning those platforms into reliable operating environments.”

Shashi Bellamkonda, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, added he saw another element in the statement.

“I see a double-edged irony in this. Broadcom’s post-acquisition VMware pricing is itself what pushed many tech leaders into pain and dependency, and the product it now sells is the antidote,” Bellamkonda said. “VCF, marketed as the route to sovereignty from governments and hyperscalers, leaves buyers just as dependent on Broadcom commercially as they were before. Sovereignty from a jurisdiction is not the same as independence from a vendor.”

This article originally appeared on NetworkWorld.