The Virtually Speaking Podcast is a weekly technical podcast dedicated to discussing VMware topics related to private and hybrid cloud. Each week Pete Flecha and John Nicholson bring in various subject matter experts from VMware, recently acquired by Broadcom, and within the industry to discuss their respective areas of expertise.
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AI is changing the way organizations think about private cloud, from infrastructure and security to developer experience, operating models and cost. In this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, Pete Flecha and Jad El-Zein are joined by Vivek Vijay and John Hall from Kyndryl to discuss what it takes to prepare private cloud environments for the AI era. The conversation explores the growing…
Fire. Flood. Blood. is back. 🔥🌊🩸 Everybody in IT has that story. The outage, the flooded data center, the script that went sideways, or the moment you thought, “What the hell was I thinking?” At VMware Explore, we’re bringing Fire Flood Blood back to Virtually Speaking and we want to hear your craziest IT stories and the lessons you learned from them. Going to Explore? Come find us and bring…
VMware Explore 2026 is almost here, and the Virtually Speaking crew is getting ready for Las Vegas. In this episode, Pete Flecha is joined by John Nicholson, Jad El-Zein, and special guest Duncan Epping to preview the week ahead. They talk about the return to deeply technical content, the sessions they’re most excited about, the evolution of Hands-on Labs, Odyssey competitions, and why the…
VCF 9.1 goes beyond the foundational infrastructure to help organizations deliver a true private cloud experience through automation, self-service, and policy-based governance. In this episode, Pete Flecha and Jad El-Zein welcome Maher AlAsfar, Product Marketing Engineer at Broadcom, to explore what is new in VCF Automation 9.1. The conversation covers declarative infrastructure, Kubernetes-native…
Can a lean IT team successfully adopt VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)? Jeremy Wright joins Pete Flecha and John Nicholson to share how Grinnell Mutual transformed its infrastructure strategy after initially assuming VCF was only for large enterprises. Jeremy discusses how uncertainty during the VMware acquisition led his team to VMware Explore looking for answers—and how one conversation changed…
At VMUG Connect 2026 in Minneapolis, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Ryan Lance from the VMUG leadership team to talk about the evolution of the VMUG community and what’s changing with the new VMUG Connect format. Ryan shares his journey through the VMUG community, from early user group involvement and speaking at events to leading the Sacramento VMUG. The conversation explores how…
In this episode, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson welcome back Bob Plankers for a deeper conversation on why AI changes the security game. Bob explains how AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery, exploit creation, malware customization, and even end-to-end attack execution. The discussion covers why “patch the critical stuff only” is becoming riskier, how AI can chain moderate vulnerabilities…
At KubeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, Johan van Amersfoort from ITQ joins Virtually Speaking to introduce one of the most talked-about demos on the show floor: Q9, an AI-powered robotic dog built using VMware Private AI Foundation. But Q9 is more than a fun demo. It showcases how organizations can use VMware Cloud Foundation, Private AI Services, GPUs, large language models, computer vision, and…
What happens when AI becomes a first-class consumer of your platform? In this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, Pete Flecha is joined by Jad El-Zien and Pankaj Gupta, co-author of the new Platform Engineering 2.0 whitepaper, to explore how platform engineering is evolving to meet the demands of the AI era. The conversation traces the journey from DevOps to Platform Engineering 1.0 and…
What happens when WebAssembly and Kubernetes come together? Recorded live at KubeCon 2026 in Amsterdam, Pete Flecha and Jad El-Zein sit down with Liam Randall, CEO of Cosmonic, to explore how WebAssembly is changing the way developers build, deploy, and operate cloud-native applications. Liam explains why WebAssembly is generating so much excitement beyond the browser, how it complements…
Private cloud is no longer just about cost savings or control—it has become the foundation for enterprise AI. In this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Prashanth Shenoy, VP of Product Marketing for VMware Cloud Foundation, to discuss the findings from the Private Cloud Outlook 2026 report. Based on a global survey of 1,800 IT leaders, the…
At VMUG Connect 2026 in Minneapolis, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with security expert Bob Plankers to discuss how AI is changing cybersecurity—on both sides of the battle. The conversation explores how threat actors are increasingly using AI-powered techniques, from sophisticated social engineering attacks to campaigns like UNC5221 and “Brickstorm.” Bob explains why identity remains…
