‘Partners now, after a year of transformation that they’ve gone through jointly with us, have realized there’s more staying power for them to partner with Broadcom than not. There’s a lot more profitable business to be done, not only selling VMware solutions, but providing value-added services on top of VMware solutions,’ says Broadcom’s Prashanth Shenoy.
Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) solution has the best price performance and total cost of ownership in the cloud world in 2025 along with a huge services opportunity for Broadcom-VMware partners, says Broadcom’s vice president of VCF.
“If customers truly had better choices, they would have been off of VMware a long time back or even as part of Broadcom. You’ve seen our Q4 results and you’ll see our upcoming Q1 results—that doesn’t seem to be the case,” said Prashanth Shenoy, Broadcom’s chief marketing officer and VP of its VMware Cloud Foundation Division.
VMware revenue under the first full year of Broadcom ownership was up 3 percent to $13.8 billion as of fourth quarter 2024. In its final year of independent ownership, VMware generated $13.35 billion in revenue.
Compared to competitors like Nutanix and Red Hat, Shenoy said the total cost of ownership of a full-stack private cloud architecture via VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) bests all market competition.
“All this discussion about these price increases, when we sat with our customers to truly say, ‘The price that you paid was generally on a perpetual license for support. And now, if you have more than one component of the VCF stack—for example: vSphere with VSAN,or vSphere with NSX—the VCF pays for itself because that’s how we priced it.’ We priced it at $350 per core per year, which is equal to two components of the previous VCF stack that was there,” Shenoy said.
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“There is flexibility and choice for the customers, but in every phase, we can guarantee that we will come out on top when it comes to operational efficiency, performance, innovation, as well as total cost of ownership,” he said.
Shenoy was previously VMware’s vice president of cloud platform, infrastructure and solutions marketing before the company merged with Broadcom in 2023. Shenoy spent 22 years at Cisco in top marketing executive roles before joining VMware in 2022.
From recently revamping VCF partner certifications to Broadcom shifting professional services from Broadcom-led engagements to partner-delivered services, 2025 is a “huge year” for Broadcom-VMware channel partners.
“Partners now, after a year of transformation that they’ve gone through jointly with us, have realized there’s more staying power for them to partner with Broadcom than not. There’s a lot more profitable business to be done, not only selling VMware solutions, but providing value added services on top of VMware solutions,” he said.
In an interview with CRN, Shenoy talks about VCF’s TCO versus competitor offerings, revamping VCF certifications ahead of launching VCF version 9 later this year, and the three biggest opportunities for Broadcom-VMware channel partners in 2025.
VMware has increased prices since switching from siloed product offerings to a few pre-packed, full-stack bundles. Does VCF have a better price performance compared to your competitors like Nutanix, Red Hat and Scale Computing when you’re talking about an end-to-end solution?
Yes, 100 percent.
It’s been very important for us to sit with our customers and our partners to truly help understand what VCF is. Because a lot of our customers and our partners didn’t really realize the full value of VCF. I personally have made sure when I discuss with customers and partners, I actively encourage them to look at alternatives out there.
Because if there’s one thing that Broadcom does is to truly focus on R&D. We invest 15 percent of our revenue directly in R&D. So we are very focused on building high quality products that are highly, highly cost effective for our customers. We stand by that.
So we are actively encouraging customers to do a fair TCO comparison of Nutanix, compare Red Hat, compare even the native public cloud and hyperscalers saying what does it take to run my modern and my traditional VM-based workloads, and have all of the compute, network, storage and operations capability, and look at the price per core, and compare that to an equal service that they can provide. And look at the TCO of managing, operating, maintaining that, and we will come out on top.
How often does VCF ‘come out on top’ regarding TCO pricing?
Our own studies have shown we are 40 percent better than native public cloud or three-tiered, hardware-defined data center architectures. Things may vary.
We’ve seen our customers get up to 560 percent ROI and nine-month payback for the investment.
So we are very, very focused on making sure this is highly cost effective from a TCO perspective for our customers. But more importantly, we will work with the customers to have a very staggered pricing approach. Because a lot of our customers do annual budgeting.
We want to make sure that if they’re getting a three-year subscription, let’s work out the price so that—as you deploy different components and the value that you get—we can price you accordingly.
So we’ve done some very, very flexible annual payment plans to make sure it’s easier for our customers to get a staggered way of realizing and paying for that.
Click through to read the rest of CRN’s interview with Broadcom’s Shenoy about VCF prices, competition and the biggest Broadcom-VMware partner opportunities in 2025.
Anything else to say regarding VCF price performance versus the competition?
If customers truly had better choices, they would have been off of VMware a long time back or even as part of Broadcom. You’ve seen our Q4 results, and you’ll see our upcoming Q1 results—that doesn’t seem to be the case.
We’re seeing very strong momentum in our growth of VCF as the platform, as well as in the space where VCF is not necessarily the right solution.
We do have alternates: we have VMware vSphere Foundation; we have vSphere Standard; and we have Enterprise Plus also that we unveiled in the market last year based on customer feedback. So customers still have flexibility and choice.
If they are trying to deploy a private cloud, then VCF is the answer.
If they just want an enterprise grade HCI platform, then VMware vSphere Foundation is the answer.
If they just want compute virtualization, we have Enterprise Plus for that.
So there is flexibility and choice for the customers, but in every phase, we can guarantee that we will come out of top when it comes to operational efficiency, performance, innovation, as well as total cost of ownership.
How is Broadcom making VMware Cloud Foundation compelling for your customers and partners?
We have done a lot to make this very, very compelling for our customers as well as for our partners.
Number one, all this discussion about this price increases, when we sat with our customers to truly say: The price that you paid was generally on a perpetual license for support, and now, if you have more than one component of the VCF stack—vSphere with VSAN or vSphere with NSX—the VCF pays for itself because that’s how we priced it.
We priced it at $350 per core per year, which is equal to two components of the previous VCF stack that was there.
It’s very, very price competitive, but we completely understand that you don’t want to deploy all of this at once. So let us help you find, ‘What are the use case that you are trying to achieve?’ And slowly help you get to full stack adoption.
In each of the phase, let us show you the TCO benefits and the ROI benefits that you’re going to get.
So we have built this private cloud modernization program jointly working with our partners that:
Number one: helps assess where our customers are in the journey of private cloud.
Number two: look at their maturity compared to where they want to be.
Number three: decide what are the use cases that they want to deploy so they can get that private cloud.
Number four: give them a very prescriptive adoption plan that our partners can help deliver.
As you do this, clearly show what is the TCO benefit that you’re going to get as you deploy the services and get to full stack.
The private cloud modernization program has this tool that we call our Private Cloud Modernization & Optimization, which is now available for partners.
This is highly customized on an account-by-account basis. So partners can sit with the customers, see what their current environment is with VMware and Broadcom, and then help customers get the full stack and value, and see what services they can provide.
We’ve also made sure that our customers have this service entitlement for VCF, so that 15 percent of their total contract value they can leverage for VCF services working with our partners. That’s a huge benefit for them.
It shows our commitment as Broadcom to say, ‘We just don’t want you to buy the product. We want you to use the product that you’re buying and realize the full value.’ And we want our partners to help in that journey. All of that 15 percent is for the partners. Partners can leverage that to build services.
Where else is Broadcom investing in and helping your channel partners?
It’s also around certification, learning and training programs. Both our customers and our partners are, generally, not full private cloud experts.
They have been compute experts or networking experts or storage experts. We want to change their mindset to think, ‘What does a platform operating model look like? If you need to break all these silos in your enterprise IT organization, what would building a private cloud need to look like?’ Let us help you train, educate, enable you on how to build, operate, manage, consume and protect a private cloud environment.’
So we have completely revamped our VCF certification.
When we unveil the general availability of our VCF (version) 9, we will have all of these certifications ready to go and training for our partners and our customers, so they’re not only getting the product, but they also know how to build, deploy, operate and consume the product. So it’s not just about the product, but it’s also about the learning and certification that we have put in place for partners.
Also, we are now training our education partners, that we call EDP (Education Delivery Partners), so they can go build the learning and certification practices and train our customers to be a private cloud expert and how to deploy a VCF.
So the revenue goes to them. We are just helping them to be successful in training and certification.
It shows that we are here as a business to build a private cloud platform. Our partners are truly our strategic partners who can help build, deploy, operate that with our customers, and also help them do learning and certification.
What are the three biggest partner opportunities in 2025?
Number one: what we have seen is what we call the staying power.
So partners now, after a year of transformation that they’ve gone through jointly with us, have realized there’s more staying power for them to partner with Broadcom than not. There’s a lot more profitable business to be done, not only selling VMware solutions, but providing value added services on top of VMware solutions. And also helping provide more professional services beyond the value-added advanced services that they can provide.
Number two: the way we have built our VMware Cloud Foundation product is to make it a lot simpler for our partners who are helping their customers to build, operate, consume the platform.
Things that were very painful and mundane to do to build a private cloud platform, we are making it drastically simple. What that means is the value that the partners can provide needs to be on top of the platform. Not the racking and stacking and building the things, but what can I provide on top of the things?
Number three: it’s a very paradigm shift, frankly, for our customers and partners who are used to doing business with VMware when we were an independent company. Because now we are giving our partners and our customers, not components—we are giving them a true platform.
The way they need to think about building this operating platform, the skillset and the mindset is very different. So part of it is helping us work with our partners to educate our customers. Like the public cloud experience, if you want to bring it to your own enterprises and partners be the IT heroes, what does it take for you? So all of the reskilling, the certification, the learning, is the third thing that we are intensely focused on.