Broadcom Software CTO: Charting a Course to Software Modernization

By Andy Nallappan, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations, Broadcom Software

This article was originally published here by Andy Nallappan.

The enterprise software that underpins day-to-day operations is under significant strain at many organizations. Between the now-prevalent hybrid cloud architecture and ongoing digital transformation efforts, entire industries are experiencing tectonic shifts in how they do business and disruptions from new competitors. For IT leaders, these changes have heightened their focus on software modernization.

Software modernization is an imperative for many organizations, including Broadcom Software, because existing applications and other technologies might be incompatible with today’s flexible and agile open-system platforms, which can empower companies to quickly and more easily pivot to new business models and scale to meet demand. Modern software can enable business transactions and workflows to be executed with the highest levels of security and compliance, while delivering the compelling customer and employee experiences that users have come to expect. Moreover, faced with the costs associated with maintaining  applications and infrastructure and an ongoing IT skills shortage, many enterprise IT leaders are searching for ways to use automation to bring speed to standard processes and clear the decks for their people to pursue higher-value work.

Transforming the enterprise

By embracing a modernization strategy, companies can transform their enterprise software portfolio with a next-generation technology stack, including a scalable, cloud-native environment, to drive new processes and collaborative workflows. This strategy can also set the stage for continuous innovation, enabling companies to optimize with data and deliver exceptional experiences that elevate products and services, create customer and employee loyalty, and burnish the corporate brand.

We appear to be at a tipping point, with industry rallying around software modernization as a path necessary for ongoing business growth. According to one estimate, the global market for application transformation, valued at $8.43 billion in 2019, is expected to grow steadily at a compound annual growth rate of 10.4% from 2020 to 2027, fueled by increasing digitalization, the worldwide rise of the internet and mobile devices, and growing reliance on big data.

A software modernization journey

My organization, Broadcom Software, set out on our software modernization journey for a variety of reasons, including the need to bolster product resiliency, reduce the chance of outages, and improve our time-to-delivery cycle for releasing new capabilities and applications. Yet the most important driver was to reimagine, deliver, and support our portfolio as an integrated bundle of software rather than a series of one-off point solutions assembled from prior acquisitions. Re-architecting around a modern software platform would enable better delivery across our entire portfolio and provide more consistency and ease of integration for individual applications. It would also create synergies and efficiencies for the different software business units and product portfolios. Indeed, standardizing on a common architecture and embracing new open systems-oriented engineering practices can be a good business practice for any growing company, delivering huge economies of scale — including a reduction in overhead — while simultaneously improving software efficiency.

We leaned into a number of important engineering practices to facilitate our software modernization journey. Among the most important were:

• Adopted Google Cloud as a uniform, scalable, cloud-agnostic platform for product development to deliver rapid elasticity when catering to huge spikes in request ingestion for products reaching up to 1 million requests per second. Moreover, this practice was essential for refactoring the products according to a containerization framework that leverages Docker and Kubernetes.

• Embraced transformative DevOps practices to increase agility and software quality through automation of workflows.

• Supported a DevSecOps “shift-left” approach to integrate security at every level of the systems development life cycle, which helps us identify vulnerabilities before they reach production. DevSecOps addresses two common problems: It holds people accountable to security issues upfront, which can reduce the number of cycles needed to improve software, and better protects the software supply chain.

• Increased commitment to operational efficiency through real-time observability, proactive alerting, and automation remediation. In lieu of individual product silos, common operations such as cloud management, infrastructure as code, and software-as-a-service provisioning are addressed through a horizontal, standardized software operations group that transcends products. That liberates individual product teams to focus on product features and roadmaps, which helps create better customer experiences, and appeals to more experienced talent, ultimately fostering more effective recruitment and retention.

Broadcom Software has made significant investments in partnerships to drive this software modernization transformation and devoted 18 months to executing our roadmap. We’ve scaled our cloud proxy to 50 data centers worldwide and believe new businesses are now more easily integrated into our portfolio, our products are more secure, and our customers are more satisfied than ever. The journey has not been without its challenges, but the overall outcome is clear: We feel better positioned to execute on our bold vision and to empower our customers to achieve their business goals, drive innovation, and soar to new heights.

To learn more about how Broadcom Software can help you modernize, optimize, and protect your enterprise, contact us here.

About Andy Nallappan:

Andy is the Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations for Broadcom Software. He oversees the DevOps, SaaS Platform & Operations, and Marketing for the software business divisions within Broadcom.