Broadcom Software and Google Cloud: What’s Next for Software

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

Last month at Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Fla., I enjoyed talking with ZDNet’s Chris Preimesberger and Sahana Sarma, leader of Google Cloud’s transformation advisory, about the enterprise software landscape and how it is growing more complex and business-critical daily. Transforming and modernizing software are key priorities for global organizations and critical to achieving the highest level of security and compliance. Many industries, from manufacturing, to automotive or financial service are becoming increasingly software-driven, changing their traditional portfolio mix and business models.

Here are some key points from that discussion:

Investing in R&D

At Broadcom we are seeing some of the same challenges our customers face that lead them to transform their software including: business transformation, talent risks, and managing costs. In a hyper competitive market where start-ups are challenging the established enterprises, companies are looking to pivot their business models through digital transformation. For Broadcom, who is experiencing some of the same challenges, it’s interesting to note that R&D spend has out-paced our revenue by almost 50%. That tells you quite a bit about how we approach doing our business and the importance we place on innovation.

Broadcom wasn’t originally a software company – it started in the early 1960s as the processor-making division of HP – but we got into the software business when we acquired CA Technologies and the Symantec Enterprise business. They were not modern cloud-based software companies and their portfolios were a mix of traditional on-prem software, cloud services, and some cloud-native.

One of the biggest challenges Broadcom had was to standardize platforms and processes of our acquired software companies, and so Broadcom Software worked closely with Google Cloud on this transformation journey, leading us to modernize and transform our own enterprise software. We wanted to standardize and put into a single, cloud-native platform all of our software, where it could give the biggest benefits to customers, and so it could scale, be resilient, and secure.

Continuous Innovation

With our Google Cloud journey, we’ve brought all of our software platforms onto a single SaaS platform. One of the reasons our customers want SaaS applications is that they want to see innovation happening at a faster rate. If you’re using a traditional on-prem application, you have to do upgrades and reinstalls, and it takes years to get it completed.

So as a software provider, we’ve got to deliver those SaaS apps in that space and the new features that go with them, and we need to do them in a speedy DevOps manner. Going to the cloud and modernizing (these systems) enables our developers to deliver all of this to the expectations of our customers in order to help them transform their businesses.

At Broadcom, we worked to give each of our software divisions a single pane of glass to better manage the business and track what was happening from the sales motion to customer adoption to R&D spend.  We also centralized software operations so the engineers could focus on delivering technologies that solved big, complex problems for our customers — in a way we liberated them to focus on great innovations and stronger customer experiences.

Sahana shared that at Google Cloud what they see from their customers when they transform their software is that they get to introduce more modern practices into their technology stack like containerization. So by having a more modern software stack, you can easily add in newer technologies — which introduces innovations. And by developing, adopting and promoting Open Source technologies Google Cloud ensures the neutrality of cloud and helps safeguard investments. Finally, by using Google Cloud as the backbone, you can free up software engineers to focus on new technologies and new ideas since they are not bogged down by complexities of different architectures and platforms.

Exceptional Experiences

Transforming and modernizing your software stack can help customers deliver better experiences for their customers and employees including:

• Always available and auto-scalable: Clients deliver improved experience to their end customers with an always available and auto-scalable technology stack to meet customer demands with unparalleled responsiveness leveraging our fastest and safest global network
• Modernizing applications: Using solutions like Apigee and Anthos customers are unlocking their traditional systems to leverage the flexibility and agility of Cloud. If systems are unified, end-users can get what they need done in fewer steps. It improves the overall experience the end users have with the product or brand.
• AI & ML: A modernized technology stack allows them to leverage AI & ML tools, making it easier for our customers to anticipate the needs of their end-users to deliver better experience, besides significantly improving operational efficiencies

Reducing IT Complexity

Obviously the benefit of reducing IT Complexity helps customers to see a large range of benefits like faster delivery of products, improved compliance, and higher level of security when they modernize. The more complex your IT architecture is, with different platforms or silos, the more risk you introduce. By modernizing and having an open system, you can reduce IT complexity and therefore reduce risk. Most importantly, a modernized technology stack helps to quickly adapt and respond to the market, economic and customer demands. By transforming and modernizing you can lessen IT complexity and not only lower risk but deliver more success for your business and your customers.

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.