What VMware Explore 2026 Reinforced About the Private Cloud Experience

As a product architect working on Rackspace Cloud powered by VCF, I spend my days deep in requirements, design decisions and operational details. VMware Explore was an opportunity to step outside the day-to-day technical work and share it directly with customers, partners and the broader VMware community.

This year, Rackspace participated in five general sessions, including two alongside Broadcom, and delivered six booth sessions demonstrating Rackspace Cloud powered by VCF and RackAI. For me, the most rewarding part was connecting those interactions to a bigger conversation: What should customers expect from private cloud today?

Customers should benefit from private cloud without becoming cloud operators

The story I wanted to tell at VMware Explore was straightforward. Customers want to focus on their workloads rather than managing the underlying stack. Private cloud should make it easier to use the applications and services they need without taking on more infrastructure complexity.

AI is another area of interest, with customers looking for a more direct path to deploying AI models closer to their data. At the same time, they continue to depend on established applications. A managed private cloud should give them a practical way to support both, without creating another environment their teams have to learn, integrate and operate.

In that model, traditional virtualized applications can run alongside Kubernetes-based applications, database services and AI workloads within the same private cloud environment. Bringing those capabilities together can reduce the number of separate platforms and processes application teams have to navigate, while Rackspace takes on more of the underlying operational work.

That broader service model is shaping our work on Rackspace Cloud. Our goal is to give customers the benefits of private cloud while taking responsibility for more of the underlying operational complexity.

Demonstrating Rackspace Cloud and RackAI at VMware Explore let us show how that model works, connecting infrastructure to the applications and services it supports while reducing the operational work customers have to take on.

Infrastructure teams have a broader role to play

Across conversations with customers, engineers, architects and industry leaders, I heard a consistent theme: Infrastructure teams know their role is changing.

The environments they support remain essential, even as more leadership attention shifts toward new application and AI initiatives. That shift allows infrastructure teams to apply their expertise in ways that are more directly connected to what application teams and the business need.

The people who understand reliability, capacity, networking and lifecycle management already have much of the knowledge required to support a broader cloud platform. Their experience can help make services easier for application teams to consume while keeping the underlying complexity from becoming another problem those teams have to solve.

When I evaluate a service, I try to look at it from the application team’s point of view. How much coordination does it take to get what they need, and how much of the underlying infrastructure do they have to understand before they can start using it productively?

Our meetings with the VCF, Avi, vDefend and Tanzu product teams gave us a chance to examine that same challenge from the product side. We discussed how individual technologies need to work together as services that customers can use and Rackspace can support over time.

What I’m taking back to product planning

VMware Explore 2026 reinforced something important for me. A successful demonstration is only the starting point. The real test is whether we can make that same experience practical, manageable and repeatable for customers.

That is the point where product planning has to carry the experience beyond the demo. A service should be straightforward to request, deploy, manage and support throughout its lifecycle. Adding more capabilities should not create more operational complexity for customers or infrastructure teams.

The conversations and demonstrations at VMware Explore gave me fresh context for work we already prioritize at Rackspace. The full service experience has to remain central to how we design, from how customers request a service to how they use and operate it over time.

The demo floor gives us a chance to show what Rackspace Cloud and RackAI can do. The work afterward is making those capabilities consistent and practical in customer environments.

Learn more about Rackspace Cloud powered by VCF and talk with our team about a private cloud strategy built around your applications and business outcomes.