Kyndryl today announced an expanded strategic alliance with Broadcom to deliver end-to-end consulting services for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), bringing cloud-like speed, automation and developer experience to private and hybrid cloud environments.
Under the expanded collaboration, Kyndryl and Broadcom are helping enterprises modernize, secure and scale mission-critical systems by building sovereign, AI-ready private clouds that reduce operational complexity, are secure by design and strengthen long-term performance. To support this joint effort, Kyndryl and Broadcom are investing in the skills development of several thousand certified Kyndryl consultants, architects and delivery specialists to enable agentic workflows.
The announcement comes as enterprises confront a rapidly shifting landscape. AI is accelerating innovation, but it is also amplifying risk as Frontier AI models are collapsing zero-day exploits to just hours and posing challenges to regulatory compliance and operations for organizations running critical systems. Sovereignty rules are reshaping where autonomous agents discover and exploit vulnerabilities across application source code, containers, VMs and pipelines at machine speed, without conventional signatures. Modernizing IT infrastructures to defend against fast-moving adversaries requires a private cloud hardened with policy guardrails and secure golden paths before a workload is provisioned, not patched after the fact.
Through the expanded collaboration, Kyndryl provides end-to-end VCF and VMware Tanzu transformation capabilities across advisory and strategy, architecture and design, upgrade and modernization and secure Day-2 operations, spanning virtualized and containerized workloads, while enabling seamless integration with public cloud landing zones as workloads evolve. With deep industry knowledge across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, government and regulated industries, Kyndryl’s modernization approach maximizes business impact along with technology transformation objectives.
Kyndryl is also focused on helping mutual customers operationalize AI governance across VCF environments by applying the Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework and its policy as code capability to hold agents to approved, deterministic actions informed by business rules and regulatory requirements, so automation stays inside guardrails and drift is contained. This will ensure that AI agents act only within approved, deterministic guardrails shaped by each customer’s business rules and regulatory requirements, containing drift while preserving flexibility across models, data and infrastructure.
Combining the VCF private cloud capabilities with Kyndryl’s managed services unlocks the value of VCF, enhanced through industrialized operations, automation and AIOps-driven delivery. The result is a unified private cloud environment that runs virtual machine and containerized workloads, including AI inferencing, on a single scalable platform. IT teams and platform engineers can deliver an agile and robust developer experience, while maintaining the security, control and sovereignty the business requires.
Additionally, Kyndryl’s cyber recovery capability – built on VCF’s isolated recovery environments (using VMware vDefend), immutable snapshots (using Advanced Cyber Compliance) and orchestrated runbooks (using VCF Automation/Operations) – restores critical operations rapidly and with verified integrity. Kyndryl is a Pinnacle Partner in the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program and one of the world’s largest providers of managed VMware assets. The company was recognized as Broadcom Mainframe Partner of the Year 2025 in South America and in Finland. Kyndryl’s VMware services are bolstered by deep expertise and proficiency in the latest skills and technologies companies need to modernize VMware environments and adopt new VCF capabilities to enhance their VMware estate and achieve business objectives.
Learn about Kyndryl’s alliance with Broadcom VMware.
Kyndryl Report: As AI broadens modernization agenda, leaders prioritize business outcomes over replacing legacy systems
Posted in Commentary with tags Kyndryl on October 1, 2026 by itnerdKyndryl today released its first global Modernization Report, which found that as organizations expand investments across legacy and modern platforms, modernization increasingly requires business orchestration, not technology consolidation.
Based on insights from 2,000 business and technology leaders across five continents and 12 industries, the research shows how AI is reshaping investment priorities across infrastructure and applications, while also challenging organizations’ operating models.
According to the report’s findings, the need to adopt AI now outranks priorities to reduce spending, replace legacy systems, or address a shrinking pool of legacy systems expertise. AI is the top driver of increased mainframe and edge computing use, the second-biggest driver for SaaS and private cloud expansion, and the leading reason organizations are upgrading their networks and application portfolios. Every organization with a mainframe now reports plans to deploy AI to the platform.
Together, these trends are creating more complex technology environments and new operational challenges for technology leaders.
Nearly half of respondents said they are behind schedule on their modernization goals. Agentic AI, which can autonomously plan and execute tasks, is emerging as a way to modernize faster. Ten percent of organizations have deployed agentic AI in production for modernization, applying it to typically time- and skills-intensive tasks of dependency mapping, code conversion, and generating documentation. Early adopters reported stronger outcomes, with 67% saying they are ahead of or on track with modernization goals, compared with 51% of other organizations.
The research also highlights what is slowing organizations down. Just 9% said they fully understand their applications’ dependencies, and one-quarter say they have large numbers of undocumented applications.
Among other findings, Kyndryl’s study shows that:
Modernization has become a business-wide priority, not just a technical one
The findings underscore the growing demands on CIOs, who must advance several priorities at once: AI adoption, cyber resilience, regulatory compliance, operational efficiency, and business growth. Respondents named nine distinct stakeholder groups with control over modernization, from CIOs and CTOs to boards of directors and finance and compliance teams. Modernization has outgrown the IT department and become a board-level business decision. Its growing importance also requires organizations to coordinate decision-making across more stakeholders without sacrificing speed.
Global events shape technology decisions alongside cost and performance
Sovereignty considerations are a growing factor in modernization strategies. While 65% of organizations address sovereignty selectively or primarily through a compliance lens, 63% expect sovereign cloud usage to increase and 55% expect sovereignty and regulatory requirements to place greater demands on their network architectures. The findings suggest that the geographic location of where technology runs is increasingly being shaped by governance and geopolitical considerations alongside performance, cost and innovation.
Complexity keeps compounding
The findings challenge the long-held assumption that digital transformation would lead organizations to gradually migrate toward a single preferred technology environment. Instead, their technology environments are becoming more distributed and complex as they prepare for AI. Mission-critical applications are distributed almost evenly across public cloud, private cloud, mainframe and on-premises environments, creating an increasingly hybrid enterprise. As digital transformation extends across the business, it must be underpinned by strategic, governance, and operational coordination — including a more integrated approach to cyber resilience as AI-driven threats accelerate and broaden.
Read more about Kyndryl’s 2026 Modernization Report.
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