Raghu Raghuram (VMware)
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has indicated a commitment to “immediately” invest an additional US$2 billion a year to “better unlock customer value” once the proposed VMware acquisition is finalised.
Outlined in the opening keynote at VMware Explore 2023, CEO Raghu Raghuram noted that the impending US$61 billion Broadcom acquisition, first announced in May last year, is one of VMware’s key milestones as VMware celebrates turning 25 this year.
Tan, in attendance at Explore, said that half of the US$2 billion yearly investment will go towards research and development, while the other half will focus on helping to “accelerate deployment of VMware solutions through VMware and partner professional services.”
“The proposed combination of Broadcom and VMware is pro-competitive and will deliver great value,” Tan said.
“It will advance the vision of workloads running in a multicloud environment. Our combined customers and partners will have access to a stable, growing and powerful multicloud platform.
“Broadcom will invest in growing VMware’s partner ecosystem to help them grow their own businesses and better support our mutual customers.”
Tan also said that the transaction is “progressing well” and is in “advanced stages” of regulatory deals, giving confidence that the transaction will close in Broadcom’s FY23, Tan said.
With the approval this week by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority for the acquisition following approval from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, South Africa, and Taiwan, other geographies, notably China, are still pending.
Raghuram said that the regulatory processes for remaining geographies are “well under way” and he is “confident” that approval will come soon.
The product announcements from Explore centred around two key themes of generative AI and multicloud.
VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia expands the partnership between the two companies to enable enterprises to customise models and run generative AI applications, including intelligent chatbots, assistants, search and summarisation.
VMware Cloud gained a raft of improvements including central management in which enterprises are able to manage all their cloud deployments from a single location, as well as faster disaster and ransomware recovery and expanded integrations with the major hyperscale cloud providers.
The new NSX+ cloud-managed service built for multicloud environments is designed to enable consistent network and security operations, centralised security policy management, network and application visibility, and network detection and response.
Further, VMware announced a single console for its SASE platform and edge stack to enable unified management of edge networking, security and compute infrastructure.
Overlaying AI on multicloud environments by combining things to make them easier to manage and secure has been a key theme of the announcements, overall reducing complexity in managing multicloud environments.
Claudia Muldrew attended VMware Explore 2023 in Las Vegas as a guest of VMware
