VMware has tweaked its software licensing so submarines can keep their computers running when they’re beneath the waves.

The new type of licenses became necessary once VMware moved to subscriptions, which come with a requirement for customers to operate in either “connected mode” that sees their systems generate a licensing activity report and automatically upload it to VMware every 180 days, or in a “disconnected mode” in which customers must manually upload licensing info.

Military submarines, however, are all about stealth and staying incommunicado. Breaking cover to update software licenses is not going to happen.

VMware therefore now allows some users to designate their licenses as “critical,” which removes the need for license reporting until a convenient moment.

Paul Turner, vice president of products in Broadcom’s Cloud Foundation Division, said the licenses are also used in tanks and other sensitive scenarios.

Meanwhile VMware is seeing a rising tide of customers in other sectors.

At the VMware Explore conference on Wednesday, Krish Prasad, senior veep and general manager of the Cloud Foundation Division, said that customers in the manufacturing sector are increasingly adopting Cloud Foundation for servers on the factory floor. Also at Explore, auto-maker Audi explained that changing production processes today means bringing in new equipment. The company wants to use software-defined equipment that can be programmed to run different tasks and sees sending VMs to servers that control machinery as the way to make that happen.

Sylvain Cazard, Broadcom’s president for Asia Pacific and Japan, also said that manufacturers in South Korea and Taiwan are doing similar things, giving VMware the chance to win entirely new customers in the largely settled private cloud market.

India’s second tier banks are also signing up for VCF, Cazard said, as they modernise infrastructure.

Prasad said western banks are also a source of growth for VMware, as they repatriate workloads from the cloud and build new datacenters. He said some run private clouds spanning five million compute cores. One, he said, wipes and rebuilds that cloud every two to three weeks, to ensure it erases any threats that – like submarines – operate under the radar to maximise potential for mischief.