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.

Brands like Snickers, M&M’s, and Twix are familiar to most consumers, but Mars Inc. doesn’t just produce snacks. The family-owned company, with a revenue of approximately $65 billion, is also one of the largest manufacturers of pet food and ready meals, and its more than 100 production facilities operate around the clock. Of course, this places considerable demands on its IT.

“Our team must ensure that every system, including production lines, runs at maximum performance so we can continuously deliver the products and services our customers value,” says Luciano Batista, the company’s VP of enterprise services delivery.

However, Batista and his team realized that the existing data infrastructure could no longer reliably support operations, especially during peak periods such as Halloween and the pre-Christmas shopping season. So with the support of hybrid, multi-cloud data storage service Everpure, Mars is rebuilding its data and IT infrastructure.

“The Everpure platform met all our requirements,” says Batista. “It’s a scalable platform that futureproofs our operations and integrates seamlessly with our hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

Unified storage environment 

Mars initially consolidated its complex network of storage systems for business-critical databases like Oracle and applications like SAP onto a single Everpure Flash Array system. These software-defined, all-flash storage arrays are available in versions for different workloads, and typical use cases include databases, virtualized environments, SAP applications, and AI and analytics applications. 

Mars has since expanded its flash array infrastructure and now supports mixed workloads, including VMware, Windows, and Linux in areas of production, development, and quality assurance. It also uses Everpure Flash Blade as the basis for the global SAP file system. And while Flash Array is optimized for structured data, the scale-out systems of the Flash Blade series are designed for unstructured information.

“At peak times, Everpure supports up to 300,000 IOPS without any performance degradation,” says Lincoln Silva, product owner for Linux and on-prem storage at Mars. From his perspective, another point speaks favorably of the new platform in that he estimates his team saves approximately three months of planning time thanks to the Evergreen subscription model. This is because the vendor provides regular updates for the storage platform’s hardware and software. As a result, Mars’ IT professionals can focus on more critical tasks. 

Basis for hybrid cloud strategy

Mars also works with choice vendors to implement its approach to cloud. Dedicated local storage capabilities, for instance, are being integrated into Microsoft Azure cloud workloads, which simplifies restore processes and increases resilience.

Snapshots from the local environment can be replicated to the cloud, too. Recovery point objectives (RPEs) of four to 24 hours are available, depending on system priority. “Our success is also the success of our partners,” Batista says. “We embrace a spirit of reciprocity to get the most out of our collaboration.”

The hybrid cloud allows Mars to run VMware workloads and extend its IT infrastructure to the cloud as needed. And the company aims to expand its use of cloud-native applications via Microsoft Azure at a lower cost.

“We’re seeing a data reduction ratio of 18 to one. That’s nine times the expected compression rate,” Batista adds. “This puts us on track to save up to 50% on cloud storage costs. We can now work more efficiently and make better decisions thanks to intelligent solutions and automation.”

Fewer racks and lower power consumption

By consolidating on the flash platform, Mars has also reduced the space requirements and power consumption of its data centers so they only use one sixth of the power, and the number of racks has decreased significantly.

“We’re shaping a sustainable future by changing the way we work,” says Batista. “The decisions we make today will impact the world we leave behind, and Everpure aligns with our commitment to thinking in generations, not just business quarters.”