VMware: 'With partners we're a force to be reckoned with'

Raghu Raghuram (VMware)

VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram has called its 30,000-strong partner ecosystem, a "force to be reckoned with” as the community comes to term with its impending acquisition by Broadcom.  

Raghuram briefly touched on the acquisition during the vendor's Explore 2022 event as Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sat feet away from him.

The impending Broadcom acquisition announced in May was high on the minds of attendees during the conference, which will likely be VMware’s last as an independent organisation.

Sharing that he has been spending time with Tan, Raghuram said their conversations are focused on honouring the partner community, and how to work together to “open up the next great stage of innovation”.

Pressed further on the potential impacts of the Broadcom acquisition for partners during a media Q&A, Raghuram said that things are “on track” with an expected deal close within Broadcom's fiscal year 2023.

The overall messaging for partners from Raghuram was that with the acquisition, “the opportunities are bigger, broader, and more strategic for partners to help our joint customers”.

VMware president Sumit Dhawan added “multi-cloud is here. We’ve laid out this approach for customers to become cloud smart, and we know we can’t do it by ourselves. It’s the ecosystem that’s going to be critical for us to be successful. That’s why we are strategically investing in the ecosystem”.

“We are very much open to the ecosystem growing”, he continued.

However, Raghuram and Dhawan would not share specific details, saying that as they are only in the “discovery” phase of integration planning, it was “not appropriate” to discuss these specific impacts for partners until the close of the deal.

Asked how he anticipates current market and economic dynamics will affect adoption of the announced new technologies, Raghuram said he expects adoption to continue to meet the current public cloud growth of 30 per cent, with new problems to solve constantly arising.

Sustainability was another topic on the agenda, with Raghuram saying the “collective responsibility” to hone-in on sustainability is more relevant than ever, with “a number of factors driving a healthy prioritisation of building on sustainable technologies”.

VMware has committed to powering all data centres with 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030, under its Zero Carbon Committed Initiative.

Along with the new multi-cloud management tools announced, VMware also unveiled a number of partnership updates, including new VMware Cloud on AWS innovations, the ability to purchase Microsoft Azure VMware Solution as part of VMware Cloud Universal, and a partnership with IBM that gives customers in regulated industries new ways to modernise hybrid cloud environments.

Claudia Muldrew attended VMware Explore 2022 in San Francisco as a guest of VMware.