This week Broadcom’s CEO Tan Hock Eng announced that he intended to invest an incremental $2 billion a year “to better unlock customer value” of VMware solutions.The goal of the funding is to “accelerate growth” of VMware through innovation and R&D.
Half the money will go to straight research and development, Hock wrote in a blog post. But the other half will go toward “helping to accelerate the deployment of VMware solutions”. The latter goal, he explains, will happen through the professional services of VMware and its partner ecosystem.
The move comes on the heels of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware earlier this year.
Making VMware better at what it does
Virtualization of various compute, storage and network functions gives enterprises the ability to manage parts of the data center more easily in on-prem, private cloud environments, according to Hock. This, he says, gives them results that are “similar to the productivity, efficiency, ease of use, resiliency and elasticity that enterprises enjoy with public clouds”.
The core technology to do this already exists at VMware, Hock observes, but hastens to add that “Broadcom will make additional investments to help this technology work together seamlessly and much easier to use; and resources to help more customers adopt and deploy this great technology”.
This will be done by extending the company’s multi-cloud strategy. Broadcom, Hock says, will invest in extending VMware’s software stack to run and manage workloads across private and public clouds. This, in turn, means that any enterprise can run application workloads easily, securely, and seamlessly either on-prem, or “in any cloud platform they prefer”.
‘Unlocking VMware’s potential’
The other half of Hock’s $2 billion a year initiative is centred around growing the provision of VMware professional services designed to help enterprises to deploy private clouds. This means, first and foremost, an investment in both professional services support and in external partners, Tan explains.
“Together with Broadcom, VMware will be able to partner with global system integrators and double the investment in professional services at VMware to help customers configure, use, and benefit from this technology, unlocking even more value”, the CEO asserts.
“The wider technology industry, as well as customers, will only stand to benefit from Broadcom unlocking VMware’s potential by helping it build on its strengths and ambitions.”