‘Intense Focus … on High-Quality Products’: VMware Cloud Foundation Gets Big Updates

VMware by Broadcom says it's “radically simplifying” VMware Cloud Foundation so end users see faster time to value in their hybrid cloud environments.

The multicloud software provider on Tuesday unveiled the 5.2 version of VCF, which delivers compute, networking, storage, management and security across endpoints. VMware by Broadcom says VCF 5.2 now comes with faster infrastructure modernization, improved developer productivity, and better cyber resiliency and security. 

“What these features bring is an ease of adoption of VMware Cloud Foundation, an ease of integrating their existing vSphere environment, and their compute network and storage environments, into a VMware Cloud Foundation,” Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of product marketing in the VCF division at Broadcom, said during a media briefing. “And that helps them use the platform capabilities around life cycle management, automation and operations, done for all of these components rather than doing it piecemeal, at a component-by-component level. So that's the biggest benefit of all the key capabilities that we are bringing in as part of the modernized infrastructure 5.2 release.”

The move comes a little more than six months after Broadcom trimmed all VMware products, bundles and editions from 168 to two, and pared down from about 9,000 SKUs, leaving VCF and vSphere Foundation as the two umbrella offerings.

Related:VMware by Broadcom Revamps VCSP, Adds Option for Small Cloud Providers

Along those lines, Shenoy had this to say: “Our job right now is to truly clean up the seams around these products and make them look, feel, act and behave like a single private cloud platform.”

The latest version of VCF comes, too, as research firm Forrester says its 2024 prediction that 20% of VMware enterprise customers would start to move away from the platform is “holding true.” And while VMware by Broadcom did not address any ongoing or expected attrition in the media briefing, the company did emphasize its expectation that it will maintain its market share.

Broadcom's Prashanth Shenoy

“VMware has the heritage of driving technology innovation and our infrastructure software leadership over the last two decades, and we have a very broad ecosystem of partner community and we are bringing all of that as part of Broadcom,” Shenoy said. “And what Broadcom provides is an intense focus on truly what the customer wants from us. It has ruthless prioritization, so we can have rapid execution so it can provide faster time to value to our customers, and it brings incremental R&D investment. When you look at Broadcom’s history, we ended last year, around $36 billion of revenue. Fifteen percent of that revenue was directly applied for R&D investment, which makes us one of the highest, if not the highest, in terms of the R&D spend. So there is intense focus on building high-quality products so that we can retain and sustain our market leadership.”

In the slideshow above, we get you up to speed on the latest VMware Cloud Foundation product news. But we also delve into the controversy around reports of higher VMware prices, which Broadcom CEO Hock Tan promised wouldn’t happen, and offer input on that; plus, the issue of Broadcom taking the top 2,000 accounts from the channel, from managed service provider Converge Technology Solutions.