Broadcom Simplifies Business Model for VMware Cloud Foundation

Broadcom Inc. has announced a series of go-to-market updates to its VMware software portfolio and the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program aimed at enabling faster innovation and increased value for customers while supporting more opportunities and better profitability for partners.

Updates include:

• Business model simplification with the transition to subscription licensing and per-core pricing.
• Simplification across the VMware by Broadcom software portfolio and go-to-market.
• Ecosystem standardization to deliver greater value to partners.

Transforming to a More Simplified Business

Broadcom announced VMware Cloud Foundation has transitioned from perpetual to subscription licensing. This is the standard for all major enterprise software providers, and the right model for fueling continuous innovation for customers.

A new benefit to customers is the addition of subscription portability for VMware Cloud Foundation, which enables customers the flexibility to deploy on-premises and then take their subscription at any time to a supported hyperscale cloud or VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) environment. Google Cloud is the first to support VMware Cloud Foundation license portability with other hyperscale and partner clouds expected to follow.

Broadcom has also reduced the overall size of the VMware portfolio from more than 160 products to a smaller set of offerings, focusing on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation. VCF is the flagship enterprise-class private cloud solution for customers to run their business-critical and modern applications – in a more secure, resilient, and cost-efficient manner. VMware vSphere Foundation is a simplified, enterprise-grade workload solution for mid-sized to smaller customers that integrates vSphere with intelligent operations management to provide the best performance, availability, and efficiency with greater visibility and insights.

Finally, Broadcom has created the singular VMware Cloud Foundation division to deliver a single, integrated product across all core technologies. The VCF Division includes all R&D, go to market, and professional services under a single organization to deliver maximum value to customers.

“We are all anchored by one clear and consistent focus amidst these changes: how do we deliver on our commitment to create more value, better results and faster innovation for our customers,” said Sylvain Cazard, President, Asia Pacific, Broadcom. “This decisive simplification of our VCF model enables us to do so by being the best platform for deploying a private cloud infrastructure that is ubiquitous, flexible and integrated across cloud endpoints.”

Portfolio Transformation: Fueling an Engine of Innovation

As Broadcom has driven business simplification over the past 100 days, the company continues to deliver VCF innovation, announcing new releases across both the VCF product and strategic add-ons.

New release of VMware Cloud Foundation: the newest release of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1 supports the Initial Availability of VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA in addition to new Solution Licensing, which delivers the first phase of a multi-phase program to deliver further VCF integration.      Read more in this blog here.    

Automation for Infrastructure and Application Services: Broadcom has added three new automation capabilities for data services, load balancing, and private AI to enable next-gen cloud-native and AI-powered applications across private and hybrid clouds:

• Automation for Data Services: VCF provides a native infrastructure automation and management experience for data services. This enables IT to offer self-service, enterprise-hardened Postgres, MySQL, and Google AlloyDB Omni (tech preview) to their teams, boosting developer innovation, reducing IT costs, and ensuring data resilience. For more details read the blog here.
• Automation for Load Balancing Services: through built-in VCF capabilities, cloud admins can offer application teams self-service access to L4-L7 load balancing services. These capabilities are now available to support the VMware Avi Load Balancer add-on starting in a few months.
• Automation Services for Private AI: customers can use capabilities built into VCF to automate private AI service setup and provisioning of GPU-enabled machines for ML workloads. For more details about how these capabilities support VMware Private AI with NVIDIA, read the blog here.

Integrated Network Operations Capabilities: The latest integrated network operations capabilities offered exclusively as part of VCF help IT users improve their network visibility, gain insights into network performance, and quickly identify and resolve network issues. For more details read the blog here.

Unified Ransomware and Disaster Recovery: With the VMware Live Recovery add-on service, customers can protect applications and data from modern ransomware and other disasters across on-premises and public clouds with flexible licensing for changing business needs and threats. VMware Live Recovery brings together the existing capabilities of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, VMware Ransomware Recovery, and VMware Site Recovery Manager, and adds new capabilities such as enhanced vSphere replication (1-minute RPO) and seamless extension of on-premises disaster recovery to the public cloud with ransomware recovery. All of this is delivered with a unified management experience and available through a single add-on subscription for VCF. For more information read this blog

VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA: this joint GenAI platform enables enterprises to run RAG workflows, fine-tune and customize LLM models, and run inference workloads in their data centers, addressing privacy, choice, cost, performance and compliance concerns. The solution comprises NVIDIA AI Enterprise, which includes NVIDIA NIM microservices, NVIDIA LLMs, and access to other community models (such as Hugging face models) running on VCF. Read more about the initial availability of VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA in this blog.

“Enterprises are grappling with increasingly complex business operating conditions, and a complicated, sprawling IT infrastructure is undermining growth and innovation rather than supporting it. For example, an average organization can contend with hundreds of Windows apps in their environment with dozens of full-time employees or equivalent required to manage them,” said Prashanth Shenoy, Vice President of Marketing, VMware Cloud Foundation division, Broadcom. “The changes we have made to our VCF model aim to drastically reduce complexity for our customers, partners and our teams, freeing up energy and resources to pursue more meaningful and value-added opportunities.” 

Ecosystem Transformation: Standardization Drives a Better Experience

Broadcom’s strategy is to promote adoption of VMware Cloud Foundation as the best subscription-based private cloud solution for innovation. Partners will play a critical role in helping the VMware customer base transition to the new subscription model and adopt VMware software for their private cloud infrastructure.  Since January 2024, more than 18,000 VMware reseller partners have been invited into the Broadcom Advantage Partner program at their equivalent VMware tier.

Broadcom has now redefined and relaunched the VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program with new tiers and new benefits. The new Broadcom Advantage Partner Program for VCSP partners is designed to build stronger relationships with our most valued partners, recognize them for their commitment to Broadcom, and provide them with the capabilities to grow their businesses through simplified pricing, improved margins, and richer benefits.

VCSP partners will help take VMware Cloud Foundation to a broad set of VMware’s corporate and commercial customers and deliver it as a managed private and hybrid cloud service, while also delivering sovereign cloud services that support data residency, high levels of compliance and other jurisdictional controls. Read the full blog about the relaunch of the VCSP program here.

A Successful 100 Days

In recently passing the 100-day mark since the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan reflected on what has been accomplished. He noted Broadcom has “looked at everything to identify what’s needed to create more value for our customers” and has “acted decisively to increase customer value since we closed the acquisition in late November.”

Commenting on the strategic importance of VMware Cloud Foundation, Tan said, “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 priority. 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. The first 100 days were a strong start for VMware as part of Broadcom. There's much more to come.” Read Hock Tan’s full analysis of the first 100 days here.