The “AI as a Service” playbook

Using Tanzu to complete the VCF AI story

Coté

VMUG Connect Amsterdam · March 18, 2026

💾 AI in apps...

👩‍💻 Code-assisted...

👔 Agentic normie'ing...

See also: “AI? Who me, insecure?” Coté & David Zinzian, Tanzu Catsup, March 2026.

This is your new problem with AI

• You can stand up a service
• ..but then it's just a blinking cursor.
• You need actual appdev on top.
• ...and normie dev.
• I'm going to tell you how VCF with Tanzu does that.

How we got here, fast

😢

There is much power, but much problems.

Source: IDC White Paper, sponsored by Broadcom, “On-Premises AI Infrastructure Balances Innovation and Security,” doc #US52747024, December 2024. Conducted July 2024, n=411.

Footnoted sources

• IDC: “On-Premises AI Infrastructure Balances Innovation and Security” (doc #US52747024, Dec 2024, n=411). 53% dev on-prem, 49% deploy on-prem.
• Uptime Institute: AI Infrastructure Survey 2025. 46% of AI workloads on-prem. Vendor-neutral.
• Forrester: Predictions 2026 - on-prem will capture 50% of AI infrastructure spend.
• IDC: prUS53894425 - $758B AI infra market by 2029 (backup stat).

Platform engineering helps with

• Secure zone - governed access to models and tools
• Tools devs need - frameworks, SDKs, sandboxes
• Rapid capability and feature dev with product mgmt

The one thing you must do right now.

Standards for AI integration, like model context protocol (MCP), are very early; it's a fast-moving world, but they're not all enterprise-ready yet. The solution that Tanzu Platform provides fills the gaps in these enterprise standards while delivering the telemetry we need to understand adoption, usage and continually improve our services.”

Alan Davidson, CIO, Broadcom

Sources: “Building an Enterprise MCP Server Marketplace with Tanzu Platform,” Corby Page & Brian Kirkland, January 23rd, 2026. “How Broadcom's IT Leverages Tanzu Platform to Achieve Enterprise-Scale Agentic Business Transformation,” Kevin Strohmeyer, December 2025.

Get an AI gateway before you lose control

Source: “How Broadcom's IT Leverages Tanzu Platform to Achieve Enterprise-Scale Agentic Business Transformation,” Kevin Strohmeyer, December 10, 2025.

💾 AI in apps...

👩‍💻 Code-assisted...

👔 Agentic normie'ing...

Note: audio, pictures, video are omitted.
Sources: Tanzu customers; “AI at Goldman,” FT, September 14th, 2025; “Leverage Generative AI to Streamline the Software Development Lifecycle,” Banu Parasuraman, Andrew Berenato, Explore 2025, August, 2025. “AI? Who me, insecure?” Coté & David Zinzian, Tanzu Catsup, March 2026.

Your customers have changed

You used to serve developers. Now you also serve normals.

New things platform engineers will likely do with and for AI

What app teams and platform teams need from AI

Supports all major frontier & open source models

• Model Context Protocol
• Tool/Function Calling
• Model Eval
• Public & private cloud
• Chat Conversation Memory
• Vector Databases
• RAG
• Embeddings
• Structured Outputs

• ChatClient API
• Chat Completion
• Text to Speech
• Text to Image
• Audio Transcription
• Moderation
• Observability
• Advisors API
• ETL

Source: Spring AI Reference, Spring Chat Models Comparison, both accessed Nov 10th, 2025.

Tanzu Platform developer services: Rapid agentic development with Spring AI

Sketchpad: talking points for ops audience

Spring AI - key points for ops audience

• Their devs use Java. Spring is the enterprise standard.
• Spring AI: MCP support, tool calling, RAG, embeddings, structured outputs, model eval
• Model abstraction: switch models without rewriting apps
• Platform controls which models are available - devs just consume

This is aligned with what CIOs want

What developers need and what you provide are the same thing

“Stop giving developers blinking cursors. Give them a platform.”