Broadcom has shined most of its VMware attention onto its Cloud Foundation (VCF) star but wants to garner a bit more glare from its vSphere Foundation (VVF) offering through its channel partner outlets, a platform combination that the vendor thinks can help enterprises better manage ongoing hardware-based cost concerns.

Brian Moats, SVP for global commercial sales and partners at Broadcom, in a recent blog post laid out Broadcom’s partner plans for this year, which includes ongoing support of “designing and deploying [VCF] environments at scale,” but also a “renewed focus on VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) as an important entry point for commercial customers.”

“Success will be defined by partners who can guide customers along this journey, starting with the right foundation, then expanding into areas like automation, Kubernetes, software-defined storage, (SDS), and private AI as their customer's needs evolve,” Moats wrote of this strategy.

Specific to VVF, Moats pointed to bolstering “technical and services capabilities to support both VVF-led entry points and full VCF adoption.”

Broadcom positions VVF as an “enterprise-grade workload platform for modern infrastructure delivering virtualized benefits, simplified management, cost efficiency, scalability, and serves as the core foundation for VMware Cloud Foundation.” VCF, on the other hand, is described as a “private cloud platform that combines the scale and agility of public cloud with security and performance of on-premises infrastructure.”

Hierarchically, VCF is core to VMware’s core private cloud emphasis, while VVF is “software that delivers some VCF capabilities or limited versions thereof, including vSphere, vSphere Kubernetes Service, VCF Operations, and vSAN.”

More investments on getting a better return

Moats also pointed to “targeted investments in partner enablement.” These include expansion of the Broadcom Knights technical support program and “aligning sales plays around real customer priorities, storage optimization, networking, security, and workload modernization, while enabling partners to expand into areas like competitive displacement and workload repatriation over time.”

Moats also touched on Broadcom initiatives around more complete resource utilization, an issue that current memory shortages has brought more to the fore. Those specific offerings include leveraging memory tiers to optimize infrastructure efficiency; driving greater utilization of current vSAN storage, VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS), and core platform offerings; supporting containerized workloads and private cloud-based AI systems; and expanding the scope of its vDefend security product.

“These are immediate, actionable opportunities for partners to deliver value while helping customers manage cost and complexity,” Moats wrote.

Sabina Anja, chief technologist for Broadcom’s VCF division, recently told SDxCentral in an interview that constrained memory and storage budgets can go further through software intelligence instead of waiting for or overpaying for new hardware.

“It’s a systems approach of combining the power of software to make the most out of the hardware that you’re given. That way, there’s a shortage – great, how can I squeeze the most out of what I have, which is something that your CFO and your CIO will love as a statement, because that’s what they always want,” Anja said.

Big updates on slower growth

The VCF and VVF platforms recently received updates, lavishing them with a new 9.1 designation. Those updates rolled out on the back of slowing uptake.

VMware is part of Broadcom’s infrastructure software business, which posted just 1% year-over-year growth during the first quarter (Q1) of its fiscal 2026, an amount that was down significantly from the 19% growth posted during the final fiscal quarter of 2025, and the 47% growth reported for the first quarter of fiscal 2025. That slowdown was more apparent in the shadow of more robust AI-related sales increases.

Despite the slowed growth, Tan during the associated earnings call touted VMware-specific revenues increased 13% year-over-year during the most recent quarter, with total bookings during the quarter in excess of $9.2 billion, and the executive also dismissed any notion that AI-type services have impacted this business.

“Let me reinforce that this growth in our infrastructure software business reflects our focus and investments in foundational infrastructure, and our infrastructure software is not disrupted by AI,” Tan said. “In fact, VMware Cloud Foundation, VCF, is the essential software layer in data centers, integrating CPUs, GPUs, storage, and networking into a common, high-performance private cloud environment as the permanent abstraction layer between AI software and physical chips. … VCF cannot be dis-intermediated or replaced.”

Tan added that enterprises will come to rely more on VCF to help “scale complex, generative AI workloads effectively with agility that hardware alone cannot provide. We are confident that the growth in generative and agentic AI will create the need for more VMware, not less.”

Moats further fine-tuned that message, adding that “we will continue to focus on what is working, where partners are winning, and how customer success translates into sustained growth.”