Broadcom launches VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence and Tanzu Platform 10.3 to drive agentic AI

Broadcom is pushing its new data lakehouse platform as the answer to all an enterprise’s data challenges — or almost.

VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence will enable users to curate incoming data across many different environments with its data ingestion, streaming, and pipeline engine, the company said its VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

It provides unified access to structured, unstructured, native, or federated data with full data lineage to improve observability, the company said, and can support multiple use cases including transactional, agentic and smart applications, decision support, model training and tuning, and data science.

For those AI applications in particular, it also offers native vector search at scale, enabling SQL queries and semantic similarity search across vectorized data in a single environment, and integrates with Tanzu Data Platform, the company said.

Tanzu Data Intelligence’s components include ingestion and workflow orchestration, federated query services, container compute services, real-time data services, and advanced analytics.

Tanzu Data Intelligence is available now, replacing the Tanzu Data Suite, said Kevin Strohmeyer, head of marketing for Broadcom’s Tanzu division, so many existing Greenplum or GemFire customers now renewing their Data Suite contracts will move to Data Intelligence.

Matt Kimball, vice president & principal analyst, Datacenter Compute & Storage, Moor Insights & Strategy said that, despite fears that the VMware innovation engine would shut down under Broadcom ownership, this development indicates that it seems to be alive and well.

“I can see where a customer that has invested in Tanzu for container orchestration and management will find [Tanzu Data Intelligence] especially appealing,” he said. “Data management is a foundational part of the AI equation. What VMware has announced aligns to what customers are looking for: an enterprise data platform that, when integrated with a containerized environment (like Tanzu) scales seamlessly.” 

John Annand, practice lead at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “CTOs are beginning to feel the heat of unmet expectations when it comes to AI pet projects. CFOs and CEOs are rightfully demanding to see concrete results from the time and money invested over the past 18 months of experimentation. According to our trends data, 65% of respondents expect to need to customize a model for their AI initiatives in 2025.” 

The multitude of tools and approaches for approaching this work are “nearly overwhelming”, so the chances of any two teams doing it the same way are minuscule. “This is a governance and scaling nightmare,” he said. “If Broadcom can bring order and velocity to AI experimentation on its journey towards positive ROI, that would go a long way in taking the sting out of higher VMware subscription costs.” 

Tanzu Platform 10.3

At VMware Explore the company also unveiled Tanzu Platform 10.3, which, it said, provides a series of new capabilities to help enterprises deliver AI applications and services, along with an AI reference architecture called the AI Starter Kit. The Starter Kit can also be leveraged by organizations using earlier versions of the platform.

“What we have done [with 10.3] is made it even easier for developers to collaborate by self publishing applications, AI agents, MCP servers that they are authoring into a governed marketplace, so that now the agents built by one team can be used by another team. We have also expanded the number of models and simplified the curation of these models so that they can they’re always secure, and they’re predictable. Consumption patterns in the enterprise, we have automated the modernization and upgrades of brownfield apps,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s Tanzu Division, in a media briefing.

New features include the ability to publish applications as services in Tanzu Platform Marketplace, granular service plans to set quotas for AI models, automated modernization tools for existing applications, a new security vulnerability dashboard and integrated data services observability.

“With Tanzu Platform 10.3 the company is focused on removing all of the complexity associated with orchestrating and managing all of that low level server and network management that can be so time consuming,” said Moor Insights’ Kimball.