Expanding our Private AI Ecosystem with Microsoft’s Azure AI Video Indexer

Since our inception, VMware has been driven to ensure that our customers and partners have a full range of choice in terms of the types of apps and services that they can run on our infrastructure. That core principle has also underpinned our approach to private AI.

Today I'm happy to share that among the range of commercial and open source AI models and services that we support, customers can now also run the Azure AI Video Indexer enabled by Azure Arc on VMware Cloud Foundation on-premises or in Azure VMware Solution.

Our customers and partners have been asking us to work more closely with Microsoft to bring Azure services to VMware-based infrastructure on-premises. Bringing the Azure Video Indexer on Arc to VMware Cloud Foundation represents an important first step in that journey.

The Power of VMware Private AI and Azure Video Indexer

VMware Private AI is an architectural approach that enables enterprises to harness the power of generative AI while maintaining data privacy, control and compliance. It empowers organizations to run AI services anywhere they operate.

Azure Video Indexer is a cloud and edge video analytics service that uses AI to extract actionable insights from audio and video files. When deployed as an Arc extension on Kubernetes clusters, it brings powerful video analysis capabilities to on-premises environments.

Why Integrate VMware Private AI with Azure Video Indexer on Arc?

The integration of these two technologies offers several compelling benefits:

• Data Privacy and Control: Process sensitive video content on-premises, maintaining full control over data.
• Cost Efficiency: Utilize existing VMware infrastructure for AI workloads, potentially reducing cloud costs.
• Improved Content Discovery: Enhance search experiences by automatically extracting metadata from video content.
• Intelligent infrastructure optimization: Dynamically pool and share AI infrastructure resources, including compute, networking and data.
• Compliance: Meet regulatory requirements by keeping data and AI processing within controlled environments.
• Simplified Management: Manage both infrastructure and AI workloads through familiar VMware tools.

Use Cases

There are a number of use cases where additive value can be realized running the service at edge sites or within your data centers. Those include:

• Localization: Quickly add localization to video and training content for internal users or customers across various geographic regions
• Pre-filtering and local inference: Reduce WAN network traffic by localizing AI/ML processing, which is extremely valuable for computer vision applications.
• Media and Entertainment: Analyze and tag large video libraries, improving content discoverability and enhancing user engagement. The on-premises deployment ensures that copyrighted or sensitive content remains secure.
• Corporate Training: Large enterprises can leverage this integration to automatically index and analyze internal training videos, making them more searchable and accessible to employees while keeping proprietary information within the company's infrastructure.

Let us Know What You Think!

The integration of VMware Private AI with Azure Video Indexer on Arc, running on Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters within VCF, represents a great solution for organizations looking to leverage AI for video analysis while maintaining control over their data and infrastructure. This combination offers enhanced privacy, scalability, and performance, opening up new possibilities for AI-driven insights across various industries.

As we move forward in the AI era, such integrations will become increasingly valuable, allowing enterprises to harness the full potential of AI while addressing critical concerns around data security, privacy, and compliance.

We believe enabling this Azure Arc service on VCF will bring considerable value to our joint customers, and we encourage you to take the service for a spin and give us your feedback. You can find detailed step-by-step instructions on how to deploy and operate the Azure Video Indexer on Arc on VMware Cloud Foundation here.