With the publication of the 2025 GartnerⓇ Magic QuadrantTM for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure (DHI), Broadcom (VMware) has been recognized as a leader for the 3rd consecutive year. You can view a complimentary copy of the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure report here.
Figure 1: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, September 8, 2025, by Julia Palmer, Jefferey Hewitt, Elaine Zhang, Tony Harvey, Dennis Smith.
The submission is based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), a DHI platform that delivers public cloud scale and agility with private cloud security, resilience and performance, that lowers total cost of ownership. On the heels of a very successful VMware Explore 2025, Broadcom continues to invest in VCF to help customers on their modern private cloud journey. Here are some of the most recent updates:
VCF 9.0 General Availability
Broadcom announced general availability of VCF 9.0 on June 17, 2025. VCF 9.0 is a unified private cloud platform designed for running traditional, modern, and AI workloads with a consistent cloud operational model, comprehensive automation, and enhanced security across private data centers, edge, CSP and hyperscale cloud environments. VCF 9.0 delivers a streamlined, self-service experience for developers, robust compliance tools, advanced networking capabilities with multi-tenant VPC services, and integrated security and resilience features through fleet-level management and automated identity, access and certificate rotation. VCF 9.0 focuses on accelerating application modernization and innovation by providing agility and scalability comparable to public clouds while maintaining control, security, and better cost predictability.
VMware Explore Updates
VMware Explore 2025, held August 25-28, 2025 in Las Vegas, focused on delivering a unified AI native private cloud platform that simplifies operations, empowers developers, and addresses the security and compliance demands of modern enterprises.
VCF as an AI-ready platform: Previously sold separately, VCF Private AI services will now be included as a standard capability of VCF 9.0 in the first quarter of Broadcom’s FY2026. Private AI services enable privacy and security, simplify infrastructure management and streamline model deployment. They include capabilities such as GPU Monitoring, Model Store, Model Runtime, Agent Builder, Vector Database and Data Indexing & Retrieval. By embedding all the benefits of Private AI into VCF, enterprises will get a unified platform for their AI and non-AI workloads without an additional purchase.
Enhanced security and compliance: announcements included new security services and updates to existing products to address the evolving threats to private clouds. VCF Advanced Cyber Compliance is a new advanced service for VCF that automates policy enforcement, provides enhanced platform security, and includes capabilities for automated cyber recovery using secure on-premises “clean rooms.” VMware vDefend now includes updates to the private cloud cybersecurity solution including Zero Trust security for agentic AI workloads, advanced detection of fileless malware, and new network detection and response (NDR) capabilities. An enhanced Avi Load Balancer includes a built-in Web Application Firewall (WAF) assessment tool and mutual authentication for TLS.
Infrastructure at the Speed of Developer: VMware vSAN will natively support an S3-compatible object storage interface, streamlining storage for developers by allowing for the storing and retrieval of unstructured data directly on vSAN with no proprietary hardware or third-party license required. Also announced was an expanded relationship with Canonical to help customers building Kubernetes-based modern applications by bringing enterprise grade Ubuntu and Chiseled Ubuntu containers to the VCF platform to enable organizations to innovate at speed with the security by minimizing the attack surface.
VMware Cloud Foundation Growth
Broadcom continues to drive customer momentum for VMware Cloud Foundation highlighting an innovation roadmap that delivers a modern private cloud. Today, nine of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies have committed to VCF in addition to thousands of medium-sized organizations worldwide. Additionally Broadcom announced that more than 90% of its top 10,000 customers have now purchased VCF subscriptions.
Additional Resources
- Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure
- Blog: Engineering the Next Generation of VMware Cloud Foundation
- Blog: What’s New with VCF 9.0
- News Release: Broadcom Makes VMware Cloud Foundation and AI Native Platform
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GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Broadcom.
