Broadcom has added Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo distribution support to its ongoing overhaul of VMware’s Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform sales channel, furthering an ongoing Broadcom push to reduce support concerns from long-standing VMware users and partners.

Ricky Cooper, VP of original equipment sales (OEM) at Broadcom, wrote in a blog post that the new agreements call for the VCF platform to be available on top of equipment from those vendors through Broadcom’s Advantage Program for Authorized Value-Add OEM (VAO) partners. This program provides for an “integrated” and “turnkey” way for that tier of Broadcom’s sales channel to distribute and support the VCF platform.

Cooper said that with the new vendor agreements when combined with Broadcom’s simplification of VMware’s service offerings under the VCF platform “we can deliver innovation faster through the integration of VCF with our VAO partners' unique hardware systems, software, and services, providing truly differentiated, turnkey private cloud solutions.”

Cooper added that this partner program “is designed to strengthen a co-innovation agenda with our most valued partners and deliver integrated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)-based solutions. VAO partners will drive a consistent VCF experience for our mutual customers through unique co-engineered offerings that are partner-branded, sold and supported.”

“Our goal is to deliver VCF through a rich portfolio of co-engineered offerings with our VAO partners,” Cooper wrote. “Our mutual customers will enjoy a seamless experience through tight integration of VCF with the VAO partner differentiated technologies and services to enable full stack deployment, operations, management, orchestration, monitoring, diagnostics, support and lifecycle management, all delivered by a single vendor.”

That explanation hits on several outstanding concerns that have lingered following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware late last year, including changes from a perpetual licensed to a renewable license structure, and to the partner reseller program.

Broadcom killed VMware’s long-standing partner sales and distribution channel in favor of its Advantage Partner Program, which Broadcom initially touted as a way to simplify interactions between VMware and its customers. Broadcom sent out thousands of invites to VMware partners to join the new program at different tiers based on their sales pipeline.

The program was moved to a three-tier system Pinnacle Partners, Premier Partners and Registered Partners – with that last tier really just an avenue for smaller partners to work with partners in the higher tier.

Those changes drew consternation from some partners and industry analysts.

“These partners are mad,” Tracy Woo, principal analyst at Forrester Research, told SDxCentral. “They’re mad because they’re partners and they weren’t given more notice than like a day or maybe just an email and that was it. That is very Broadcom style, it’s very matter of fact and we don’t make any apologies for it.”

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan shortly after the program launch attempted to clarify the move and highlight benefits that included the ability to “deliver consistent customer experiences.”

“To ensure there is continuity of service for this smaller partner group, we will continue existing operations with this group under modified monthly billing arrangements until the white-label offers are available,” Tan wrote.

Tan also targeted past abuse of VMware’s sales partnerships, stating that the new program ended “upsell practices that were common in the software industry before the subscription transition, such as branding incremental features as new higher editions of the same product or new add-on products. These practices do not represent true innovation in core products, and cause customer confusion and frustration about missing out on new features. Subscription licensing eliminates these incentives.”

Broadcom more recently has altered its distribution arrangement with some of the top hyperscalers, cozying up more closely with the likes of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and creating more distance with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The Dell support for the new program comes just over four months after Dell terminated a distribution agreement with its former subsidiary following Broadcom’s acquisition. That “outstanding commercial framework” was tied to how Dell and VMware distributed and collaborated on the resale of VMware software.

A Dell spokesperson explained that this new deal replaces a legacy OEM and embedded OEM agreements, “which covered software bundled and sold with Dell hardware.”

“Through this agreement, Dell and Broadcom will continue to offer solutions that meet the needs of VMware deployments spanning edge to core to cloud,” Gil Shneorson, SVP for solutions platforms at Dell, wrote in a statement on the new agreement.

Broadcom’s Cooper added that more vendor partners would be announced for the updated program.

The latest changes also come as analysts continue to state growing enterprise discontent with Broadcom’s rash of changes to VMware.

Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester Research, told SDxCentral that Broadcom’s recent licensing changes have resulted in a spike in VMware pricing for some enterprises, adding that the pricing change were not unexpected and that he and his team had predicted 20% of the world’s largest enterprises “will start to exit – read these words very carefully – will start to exit the VMware stack.”

“They will not do a full replacement overnight, but in parts, they will start to move away,” Chhabra said. “I clearly see that happening right now and I don’t need to go another five months to claim that that prediction was true. It is happening.”

Broadcom’s management has admitted that the vendor’s changes to VMware’s licensing and distribution have indeed been a sometimes painful whirlwind both for VMware internally and for its customers.

“With change comes challenges in terms of confusion, because when the pace of change and the amount of change is drastic, there’s obviously a definite confusion or challenge when we don’t communicate and articulate things in a broad amplified and consistent manner,” Prashanth Shenoy, VP of cloud platform, infrastructure and solutions marketing at VMware, recently told SDxCentral.

However, he added that these changes were necessary and a long-time coming.

“In the previous world, this would have taken us three to four years to make that change,” Shenoy said. “I joined VMware two years back and we tried this a few times, and we didn’t execute on that. So, for me, I was very glad to have made this business model transformation, portfolio transformation, route market transformation, all in a matter of months.”