Broadcom was admittedly busy last year transforming and integrating its newly acquired VMware business, efforts it hopes will allow that focus to now shift toward the acceleration and adoption of that transformed business. However, clouds from last year’s transformation will continue to hang over those 2025 hopes.

Prashanth Shenoy, VP of cloud platform, infrastructure, and solutions marketing at Broadcom, explained to SDxCentral in an interview that last year was indeed a transformational year for the VMware business that included changes to products, services, licensing, and pricing models.

“Our customers went through that journey of transformation, and I can say it was challenging for them to understand why we’re doing this,” Shenoy said. “Now our customers are fully bought on and our partners fully bought onto our product strategy, our vision, our roadmap, why we are doing what we are doing.”

Shenoy’s claim was backed by Broadcom’s VMware-based operational momentum exiting 2024.

Broadcom’s software infrastructure business, which is where VMware now lives, scored $5.8 billion in revenues during the vendor’s fourth fiscal quarter of 2024. That was a 196% increase from what Broadcom generated from that division during the same quarter the previous year, which was also Broadcom’s last quarter of earnings before it closed on the VMware deal.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said the vendor booked 21 million total CPU cores during Q4 compared to 19 million cores posted in the previous quarter, highlighting Broadcom’s expanding VMware business. More significantly, Tan said that 70% of those new booked cores were on its flagship VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform, “virtualizing the entire data center.”

Tan also noted that Broadcom had signed up 4,500 of its largest 10,000 customers to its VCF platform, and that the platform generated $2.7 billion in annualized booking value (ABV) during Q4. Those numbers are significant improvements from the 3,000 resigned customers and $1.9 billion in ABV Tan noted during the vendor’s mid-year results.

'Acceleration and adoption’ Shenoy explained that Broadcom is using that momentum to power further growth, tagging 2025 as a year of “acceleration and adoption.” This will include a continued focus on its VCF platform and increased expectations from artificial intelligence (AI).

“Last year was a year of cleaning up, simplifying our route to market, our offer, our product, giving them the direction, the confidence, and building the product,” Shenoy said of the VCF evolution. “This year is all about making sure the product gets deployed, consumed, all of the advanced services work on that, and our partners and our route to market are fully operationalized to go deliver on that.”

VCF continues to run as Broadcom’s flagship VMware platform, with a focus on providing support for on-premises deployments. The vSphere platform sits below VCF and is targeted at what Shenoy previously described as “the broader mid-tier, small data centers that just want to virtualize compute infrastructure with some good operations to manage that infrastructure.”

“We have provided a wide variety of offering for customers of various sizes and where they are in the journey,” Shenoy said of the new layered approach. “If they want a full private cloud platform, they go with VMware Cloud Foundation. If they want an enterprise-class HCI hyperconverged infrastructure platform they can go with vSphere Foundation. Or if they just want to start with compute virtualization they can go with vSphere Enterprise Plus or vSphere Standard.”

Broadcom is also pushing its AI focus, which is an increasingly important revenue driver for the vendor.

Broadcom’s overall AI-related revenues surged 220% year over year to $12.2 billion during its fiscal Q4 of 2024, which Tan tied to its custom AI accelerators and its networking business. These AI components accounted for 41% of Broadcom’s overall semiconductor revenue during that quarter and powered overall semiconductor revenue to a record $30.1 billion for the full fiscal year.

Shenoy explained that “last year was a year of experimentation” for AI, and that “this year is a year of actual implementation and getting value, … whether it’s productivity gains, whether it’s new revenue streams, whether it’s new kinds of services.”

These opportunities are funneling through VCF deployed on private clouds, which Shenoy said is where customers are basing their creation of generative AI (genAI) applications “leveraging their own proprietary data, and how that data privacy, data access, data sovereignty and data controls that IT needs.”

These efforts are initially being targeted at specific use cases like contact center applications that use proprietary information and code, and in expanding Broadcom’s partnership ecosystem to power these services.

“We have a very strong partnership with Nvidia, and a turnkey product that we have jointly built with them that we are actually selling … and we are actively working with other IHVs (integrated hardware vendors) and a whole lot of ISVs on top so that we are again an infrastructure that's agnostics to any [large language models] that can run on top of that and any hardware vendor underneath it,” Shenoy said. “That flexibility and choice, but with very specific use cases, is where we are focused on to drive momentum.”

Will Broadcom continue to support VMware in telecom? Shenoy also said Broadcom is refining its focus in the telecom space, noting it was “doubling down” on its Telecom Cloud Platform that is underpinned by VCF, efforts that could remove focus from other telecom areas.

“We were having our hands in several different pipes, but now our focus has merged to building this telco cloud platform based on the VMware Cloud Foundation and provide the right level of cloud automation and integration into the existing telco core network so they can run a very referenced architecture based on their needs,” Shenoy said of its work with telco cloud providers and operators.

Broadcom’s telecom efforts hit a speed bump last year when long-time partner Boost Mobile ditched the vendor’s container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform for a similar platform from Wind River. The operator, which recently changed its official market-facing brand from Dish Wireless, pulled VMware’s platform that had been core to its unique open network architecture since its inception for Wind River’s Studio Operator platform that is now managing all of Boost Mobile’s containerized edge-to-cloud application needs.

Boost Mobile CTO Eben Albertyn told SDxCentral in an interview that the swap was based on what he termed “cost effectiveness” or a combination of “operational performance, strategic roadmap, and overall cost.”

“Performance combined with price combined with strategic roadmap going forward, the combination of those, we are able to evaluate with open RAN, decide whether the disposition that we have right now and the vendor landscape that we have right now is at the most optimal inflection point, and if it’s not – as in this case is the matter – so where we consider those three factors combined, and we compare it against what the market is able to offer us, we can see that we can make a better decision when it comes to those three components,” Albertyn said.

Broadcom’s telecom efforts were also been tagged by a legal battle with AT&T over licensing and billing changes Broadcom has made to its VMware services. That public spat was eventually settled late last year.

Broadcom has been central to the broader push toward virtualizing telecom platforms, and Shenoy did add that Broadcom will be announcing more on its telecom-focused efforts “in the next few months.”