VMware cuts ribbon on new Private AI offerings

VMware has unveiled a brace of new Private AI solutions which it says will help drive enterprise adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

The offerings include VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, a new platform designed to help prepare enterprises running VMware’s cloud infrastructure for the next era of generative AI, and VMware Private AI Reference Architecture for Open Source, which aims to help customers achieve their desired AI outcomes through open source software (OSS) technologies.

At VMware Explore 2023 conference in Las Vegas, the company said these new solutions, along with its multi-cloud approach, will provide customers with the flexibility and control required to power a new generation of AI-enabled applications.

“With the introduction of these new VMware Private AI offerings, VMware is making the future of AI serve everyone in the enterprise by bringing the choice of compute and AI models closer to the data,” said Chris Wolf, vice president of VMware AI Labs.  

“Our Private AI approach benefits enterprise use cases ranging from software development and marketing content generation to customer service tasks and pulling insights from legal documents.”

Integrated AI tools

Comprised of a set of integrated AI tools, VMware’s Private AI Foundation offering has been designed to help enterprises run proven models trained on their private data, whether deployed on public clouds, data centers, or at the edge. 

The solution will integrate VMware’s Private AI architecture, which is built on VMware Cloud Foundation, with Nvidia’s AI Enterprise software to help customers customize models and run generative AI applications such as chatbots, assistants, search, and summarization.

VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia will be supported by Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo.

Open source ecosystem

The company’s second offering, VMware Private AI Reference Architecture for Open Source, integrates OSS technologies to provide an open reference architecture for building and serving OSS models on top of VMware Cloud Foundation. 

At its Explore event, VMware said this interconnected and open ecosystem will feature collaborations from across the value chain to support customers’ AI strategies.

The firm is partnering with Anyscale to bring its open source Ray unified compute framework to VMware Cloud environments, as well as Domino Data Lab to provide unified a unified analytics, data science, and infrastructure platform purpose-built for AI/ML deployments in the financial services industry.

VMware said it is working with global systems integrators such as Wipro and HCL to help customers build and deliver turnkey solutions that combine VMware Cloud with AI partner ecosystem solutions.

The company is also collaborating with Hugging Face to launch commercial code assistant SafeCoder for the enterprise, while its partnership with Intel means VMware vSphere/vSAN 8 and Tanzu can leverage the chip-maker’s new built-in AI accelerators on its latest 4th-Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Additionally, VMware is introducing a new AI Ready program, designed to connect ISV’s with tools and resources that will validate and certify their products on WMware Private AI Reference Architecture. The initiative is expected to be live “by the end of the year,” the firm said.

Intelligent Assist

Elsewhere, VMware also revealed it is introducing Intelligent Assist, a family of generative AI-based solutions trained on its proprietary data to simplify and automate all aspects of enterprise IT. 

Built upon VMware Private AI, the company said the offering’s features will be “seamless extensions” of the investments enterprises have made in the VMware Cross-Cloud Services. VMware products with Intelligent Assist are expected to include VMware Tanzu, Workspace ONE, as well as NSX+.

“With VMware Private AI, we are empowering our customers to tap into their trusted data so they can build and run AI models quickly and more securely in their multi-cloud environment,” said Raghu Raghuram, VMware CEO.