VMware targets public sector with Private AI

There are a host of use cases in the public sector for Private AI, according to VMware.

Private AI is a new reference architecture that enables partners to build privacy into the AI model on VMware technology. It’s selling point is that it addresses concerns around securing data privacy and intellectual property.

“While practically all organisations are looking to take advantage of AI technologies, their concerns are generally threefold: minimising risk to their intellectual property, ensuring their private data will not be shared externally, and ensuring complete control over access to their AI models,” said VMware’s chief research and innovation officer, Chris Wolf.

While most organisations use combinations of both public and private AI service stacks, there are use cases for running AI compute and models adjacent to where enterprise data is created, processed or consumed, said VMware. Common emerging use cases include code generation, contact center resolution, IT operations automation and advanced information retrieval.

With Private AI, compute capacity and trained AI models reside adjacent to where data is created, processed, and/or consumed. This is whether the data resides in a public cloud, virtual private cloud, enterprise datacentre, or at the edge.

VMware touted the benefits of Private AI last week at VMware Explore in Barcelona. Ed Hoppitt, senior director app and cloud platforms at VMware said Private AI in the public sector is “really important, really resonating.”

He told Think Digital Partners at the event: “There are bits of government that you can immediately think would never want to let data go out of the building.

“The idea that you can run the kind of services that you would normally expect to run in public cloud, [but] it’s your data in your datacentre, under your rules, is hugely powerful. If you’re a financial institution, healthcare provider or government.”

Partnerships with NVIDIA, Intel and IBM

In August VMware announced the VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, and VMware Private AI Reference Architecture for Open Source to help customers achieve their AI outcomes by supporting best-in-class open source software (OSS) technologies.

In Barcelona, VMware said it is collaborating with Intel on a VMware Private AI reference architecture that will enable customers to build and deploy private AI models and reduce TCO by using the Intel AI software kit, processors, and hardware accelerators with VMware Cloud Foundation.

The company is also partnering with IBM to enable organisations to access IBM watsonx in private, on-premise environments, and hybrid cloud for the training and fine-tuning of their models with the watsonx platform. The architecture built on VMware Cloud Foundation and Red Hat OpenShift will enable organisations to deploy watsonx AI functionality for MLOps, data management, and governance.

“I want to make it as easy as possible for customers to onboard tomorrow’s workloads onto the platform that they have. How do I take the stuff that I already have, and be ready for the for the AI workloads? That’s a privacy, intellectual property, sovereignty, conversation,” said Hoppitt.