VMware by Broadcom: The First 100 Days

We recently passed the 100-day mark since VMware joined Broadcom. While much work remains, we’ve made substantial progress as we build the world’s leading infrastructure technology company.

In the 18-month process of evaluating and acquiring VMware, we looked at everything to identify what’s needed to create more value for our customers. We’ve acted decisively to increase customer value since we closed the acquisition in late November.

We overhauled our software portfolio, our go-to-market approach and the overall organizational structure. We’ve changed how and through whom we will sell our software. And we’ve completed the software business-model transition that began to accelerate in 2019, from selling perpetual software to subscription licensing only – the industry standard.

Of course, we recognize that this level of change has understandably created some unease among our customers and partners. But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster, meeting our customers’ needs more effectively, and making it easier to do business with us. We also expect these changes to provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities for our partners.

Beyond our commitment to simplification across the organization and portfolio, and to making our products easier to buy, deploy, and use, we’ve committed $1 billion to invest in innovation.

VMware Cloud Foundation – A Platform for Agility, Innovation, and Resiliency

Like Broadcom, VMware has a remarkable history of innovation. Many major brands and Fortune 500 companies run their mission-critical workloads on VMware software. What Broadcom has brought to the table is a renewed sense of focus.

When I spoke to CIOs, CTOs, our partners and influencers over the past 20 months, three themes consistently emerged:

• Technology complexity is slowing organizations down, in an era in which speed is critical to win;

• There’s a need to simplify IT to support this increased business velocity and provide the flexibility needed to respond quickly to market changes; and

• Resilience and security are paramount, along with attracting and retaining developers.

VMware Cloud Foundation, or VCF, is our platform for innovation going forward. It’s the solution that will help us address the business outcomes our customers have expressed to me directly as their most critical priorities.

VCF is a completely modernized platform for cloud infrastructure. It’s fully software-defined compute, networking, storage and management – all in one product with automated and simplified operations. It’s more fully integrated, so our customers can reap the full value from our technology.

With VCF, our customers will achieve a highly efficient cloud operating model that combines public cloud scale and agility with private cloud security and resiliency. And we believe it delivers this at a lower cost of ownership for the average enterprise customer, compared with the ever-increasing cost of a public cloud. To allow more customers to benefit from VCF, we’ve cut the previous subscription list price by half and increased support service levels.

VCF also makes life easier for developers by offering a self-service, private cloud experience, which enables greater productivity.

In short, it allows you to be your own cloud provider.

Three distinct product portfolios add value to our VCF platform and make it competitive with current public cloud offerings: Tanzu accelerates application development, delivery and management of workloads on containers; Application Networking and Security brings distributed firewall and threat intelligence, and load balancing into this infrastructure; and Software-Defined Edge extends the public cloud to the edge.

I’ve recently been on the road meeting with customers to explain our strategy and the virtues of VCF. For more details, including an update on innovations we’re working on and how our pricing strategy will benefit customers and partners, check out this recent post from VMware’s Prashanth Shenoy.

The first 100 days were a strong start for VMware as part of Broadcom. Please stay tuned. There’s much more to come.

About Hock Tan:

Hock Tan is Broadcom President, Chief Executive Officer and Director. He has held this position since March 2006. From September 2005 to January 2008, he served as chairman of the board of Integrated Device Technology. Prior to becoming chairman of IDT, Mr. Tan was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Integrated Circuit Systems from June 1999 to September 2005. Prior to ICS, Mr. Tan was Vice President of Finance with Commodore International from 1992 to 1994, and previously held senior management positions with PepsiCo and General Motors. Mr. Tan served as managing director of Pacven Investment, a venture capital fund in Singapore from 1988 to 1992, and served as managing director for Hume Industries in Malaysia from 1983 to 1988.