As rivals circle, VMware leans on customer outcomes to validate its strategy

Paul Simos, VP, Asia, Infrastructure Software Group, Broadcom, said the company remains committed to its strategy and focuses on delivering strong business outcomes for enterprise customers

While VMware has been getting a lot of noise from partners and customers after the vendor made some changes to its pricing and partner programs following the Broadcom acquisition, the company still has a good number of customers that continue to see the value and potential from the technology that VMware is offering.

At the recent VMware Explore On Tour Singapore, VMware customers Standard Chartered and ComfortDelGro shared how they are utilizing VMware’s solutions, especially in their AI journey in the hybrid and private cloud as they look to have more sovereign capabilities.

In his keynote address, Krish Prasad, SVP and GM VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom shared how VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 is poised to the most cost-effective and secure foundation for production AI, modern applications, and traditional workloads, especially as organizations look to build on their private cloud capabilities.

For Paul Simos, VP, Asia, Infrastructure Software Group, Broadcom, VMware customers believe very strong in the private cloud and private AI, especially on the benefits that it can bring them as part of their transformation journey.

When asked how VMware is dealing with the concerns highlighted by customers and partners in Asia, Simos said the way VMware Broadcom is dealing with is to believe in great conviction on the strategy and the customers who are committed to them.

“We drive the successful outcome, and we use that to help educate other customers what's possible. As part of Broadcom, we went through our segmentation of our customers and the business. We're really focused on driving those enterprise outcomes. And what we are seeing with customers repatriating, expanding, dealing with the broader challenge of IT, they're all growing with us,” Simos said.

Simos pointed out that once customers get their head around the VCF platform, they understand how it can bring enormous value to their business.

“We've always said that we work in a competitive environment, there is choice for customers. I've gone through all those different cycles of customers leaving, customers going, but for us, the conviction of the strategy and making sure customers can feel the value is helping us continue to grow with those customers,” he added.

With regards to increasing renewal rates, Simos pointed out that Broadcom doesn’t shy away from the fact that if customers look at the total cost of ownership for a private cloud or for infrastructure, the component of VMware of that private cloud or that private infrastructure increases.

“We have a lot of real-world data now. We are transforming onto a true private cloud, expanding beyond compute virtualization to bring in things like network virtualization, specifically storage virtualization. And with VCF 9.1, we have now introduced our memory tiering capability and our NVMe drive capability. We're seeing customers that are confidently saving across their total cost of ownership when it comes to serving IT out to their organization,” he explained.

“We see it is a transformation, not only from technology, but from the way they think about the relationship with us. And we're seeing time and again customers that adopt the full transformation, have a more efficient, more affordable private cloud going forward,” Simos added.

For Simos, his message to customers is that VMware has been a really strong partner in the region for over 25 years. With the landscape the way it is today, he believes that the most efficient way for customers to deliver the IT services to their organization is through a really robust and maturely developed private cloud.

“In terms of the landscape that we operate in, we are the leader in that space. We have a very strong proven track record of customers deriving value out of the solutions and to engage. I'd say engage in achieving your outcome. And we are here to support customers on those outcomes,” he concluded.