Modern virtualization is reshaping the way IT leaders run VMs, containers and AI workloads on a single cloud native stack. On this episode of The Open Current, Alan Shimel is joined by co-host Margaret Dawson, CMO of SUSE, to unpack what the post Broadcom VMware world is doing to virtualization strategies.

About Margaret Dawson

Margaret is CMO of SUSE and a long time open source and cloud native leader. Consequently, she brings a clear view of how enterprises are re-evaluating their stacks under real cost and skills pressure.

Inside modern virtualization

Broadcom’s pricing move became a catalyst for CIOs to take stock of their virtualization estate. As a result, teams are looking at KubeVirt, Kubernetes and containers to bring legacy VMs and cloud native workloads under one control plane. Meanwhile, AI workloads are containerized workloads, so the same modern virtualization pattern quietly becomes the AI stack.

In addition, Alan and Margaret discuss the return of the skills gap as the number one IT challenge, the rise of MCP and agentic ecosystems, the myth of frictionless multi cloud portability, and why any commodity hypervisor may be good enough for many workloads. Therefore, an application by application decision grid matters far more than picking one grand infrastructure winner.

Why this matters now

Meanwhile, Black Hat 2026 made clear that security, observability and zero trust must move with the workload. Consequently, open source, transparency and auditability become non negotiable when modern virtualization, AI and agentic tooling all share the same stack.

Explore more artificial intelligence coverage and the latest Techstrong TV interviews. Furthermore, the next Open Current episode asks whether AI is creating the mother of all lock ins.

For more information please visit suse.com