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We recently passed the 100-day mark since VMware joined Broadcom. While much work remains, we’ve made substantial progress as we build the world’s leading infrastructure technology company.

In the 18-month process of evaluating and acquiring VMware, we looked at everything to identify what’s needed to create more value for our customers. We’ve acted decisively to increase customer value since we closed the acquisition in late November.

We overhauled our software portfolio, our go-to-market approach and the overall organizational structure. We’ve changed how and through whom we will sell our software. And we’ve completed the software business-model transition that began to accelerate in 2019, from selling perpetual software to subscription licensing only – the industry standard.

Of course, we recognize that this level of change has understandably created some unease among our customers and partners. But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster, meeting our customers’ needs more effectively, and making it easier to do business with us. We also expect these changes to provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities for our partners.

Beyond our commitment to simplification across the organization and portfolio, and to making our products easier to buy, deploy, and use, we’ve committed $1 billion to invest in innovation.

VMware Cloud Foundation – A Platform for Agility, Innovation, and Resiliency

Like Broadcom, VMware has a remarkable history of innovation. Many major brands and Fortune 500 companies run their mission-critical workloads on VMware software. What Broadcom has brought to the table is a renewed sense of focus.

When I spoke to CIOs, CTOs, our partners and influencers over the past 20 months, three themes consistently emerged:

Technology complexity is slowing organizations down, in an era in which speed is critical to win;

There’s a need to simplify IT to support this increased business velocity and provide the flexibility needed to respond quickly to market changes; and

Resilience and security are paramount, along with attracting and retaining developers.

VMware Cloud Foundation, or VCF, is our platform for innovation going forward. It’s the solution that will help us address the business outcomes our customers have expressed to me directly as their most critical priorities.

VCF is a completely modernized platform for cloud infrastructure. It’s fully software-defined compute, networking, storage and management – all in one product with automated and simplified operations. It’s more fully integrated, so our customers can reap the full value from our technology.

With VCF, our customers will achieve a highly efficient cloud operating model that combines public cloud scale and agility with private cloud security and resiliency. And we believe it delivers this at a lower cost of ownership for the average enterprise customer, compared with the ever-increasing cost of a public cloud. To allow more customers to benefit from VCF, we’ve cut the previous subscription list price by half and increased support service levels.

VCF also makes life easier for developers by offering a self-service, private cloud experience, which enables greater productivity.

In short, it allows you to be your own cloud provider.

Three distinct product portfolios add value to our VCF platform and make it competitive with current public cloud offerings: Tanzu accelerates application development, delivery and management of workloads on containers; Application Networking and Security brings distributed firewall and threat intelligence, and load balancing into this infrastructure; and Software-Defined Edge extends the public cloud to the edge.

I’ve recently been on the road meeting with customers to explain our strategy and the virtues of VCF. For more details, including an update on innovations we’re working on and how our pricing strategy will benefit customers and partners, check out this recent post from VMware’s Prashanth Shenoy.

The first 100 days were a strong start for VMware as part of Broadcom. Please stay tuned. There’s much more to come.

About Hock Tan:

Broadcom

Hock Tan is Broadcom President, Chief Executive Officer and Director. He has held this position since March 2006. From September 2005 to January 2008, he served as chairman of the board of Integrated Device Technology. Prior to becoming chairman of IDT, Mr. Tan was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Integrated Circuit Systems from June 1999 to September 2005. Prior to ICS, Mr. Tan was Vice President of Finance with Commodore International from 1992 to 1994, and previously held senior management positions with PepsiCo and General Motors. Mr. Tan served as managing director of Pacven Investment, a venture capital fund in Singapore from 1988 to 1992, and served as managing director for Hume Industries in Malaysia from 1983 to 1988.

Cloud Computing

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Enterprises seeking to thrive in an innovation-centric economy are capitalizing on multi-cloud strategies to leverage unique cloud services. These services help accelerate initiatives supporting AI, data processing, and other pursuits, such as driving compute to the edge.

That’s all well and good – until the CIO gets the bill.

In a survey of more than 1,000 global IT decision makers conducted by Forrester Research with HashiCorp, 94% of respondents said their organization was currently paying for avoidable cloud expenses.1

Meanwhile IDC’s Archana Venkatraman, Research Director, Cloud Data Management, Europe, adds: “While cloud adoption has accelerated, cloud governance and control mechanisms haven’t kept pace. As a result, up to 30% of cloud spend is categorized as ‘waste’ spend.”2

Examples of cloud cost surprises

Even inside the controlled environment of an enterprise’s datacenter, it’s not always easy for IT staffers to keep track of resource utilization. Now imagine the challenge of tracking usage from dozens of engineers in a multi-cloud environment where each service provider has its own tooling, processes, and procedures. Being able to bring all that data into a single view is extremely difficult.

Here are the top three cloud cost surprises that CIOs are likely to encounter.

Unused resources: Over time, cloud environments inevitably sprawl, leading to unused storage volumes, idle databases and zombie test instances.

Modernization: Businesses are slow to adopt newer instance types which offer 20% or more efficiency gains due to lack of visibility and understanding of the upgrade path. Given the hundreds of instance types, it’s easy to understand why.

Anomalies: The biggest cloud cost surprise is the one that comes out of nowhere – an unexpected spike that could be caused by a variety of factors – misconfigurations, orphaned instances, runaway crypto-mining malware, or unauthorized deployments.

Enter FinOps

FinOps has become the de facto way in which enterprises manage cloud cost uncertainties, typically with machine learning used to help deliver insights to DevOps, CloudOps and the C-Suite. What’s more, FinOps provides a common language between the developers, infrastructure and business leaders to help show Return on Invetsment per project or set of services.

A disciplined FinOps practice, coupled with tools like OpsNow, helps in three ways:

FinOps tools can discover unused or orphaned resources and enable organizations to “rightsize” their cloud deployments.

Through the use of anomaly detection, FinOps provides an early warning system that alerts IT teams to usage spikes and budget overruns before they get out of control.

Cloud environments are constantly changing, so FinOps is never done; it’s an ongoing process that can help organizations optimize their cloud spend over time, do a better job of budgeting and forecasting, as well as avoid those billing surprises.

The OpsNow approach

There are many options for FinOps ranging from developing tools in-house to purchasing FinOps platforms. Managing your own platform and tooling presents  CIOs with investment and ongoing maintenance challenges.  In the fast moving world of the cloud that is a risk many prefer to not pursue.

OpsNow offers a different take and allows you to deploy without the investment nor maintenance.  Coupled with its methodologies and metrics you have a way to monitor and track your success.  

OpsNow, a spinoff from Bespin Global, provides  a SaaS platform which utilizes a “shared savings”  model – customers only pay a small percentage based on actual savings and are free to utilize the breadth of capabilities at no cost otherwise.

The OpsNow platform provides a single pane of glass across multi-cloud environments to identify unused resources, recommend capacity adjustments, provide AI insight for optimization, and provide no-risk cost savings from their AutoSavings tool which best even  the multi-year commitments offered from the clouds.

Advanced cost analytics and machine learning also ensure this technology can support a more efficient approach to cloud spend, which ensures IT leaders can innovate without worrying about unexpected costs. The automation is one aspect, but the ability to closely model true usage and ensure the coverage and utilization are closely aligned to the forecast is where the savings typically add up. 

Begin your journey to better cloud cost efficiency now.

1 HashiCorp, Forrester Research Report: ​​Unlocking Multicloud’s Operational Potential, 2022
2 IDC, IDC Blog, The Era of FinOps: Focus is Shifting from Cloud Features to Cloud Value, February 2023

Cloud Computing

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The global climate crisis is one of the most significant and urgent issues facing the planet today, threatening the ecosystems we depend upon. A collective effort is urgently required. One way to help protect the environment for future generations is for every business to begin moving towards carbon neutrality.

A carbon neutral business is one that has minimized its carbon footprint through a combination of measures including increased operating efficiency, switching to renewable energy, and investing in carbon offset projects that not only mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but also create immense social impact by providing new jobs and opportunities for strengthening communities vulnerable to unsustainable practices.

At HP, the health of our planet, people, and communities has always been a core value. This is why we’re stepping up to meet this most critical challenge by offering HP customers a certified carbon neutral Managed Print Service offering. A simple and cost-effective way for businesses to make a genuine difference, without business disruption.

Make the right choice for the environment

HP Managed Print Service (MPS) is CarbonNeutral® certified in accordance with The CarbonNeutral Protocol1 and covers the lifecycle emissions of HP printers, HP supplies, paper, manufacturing, transportation, use, and even end of service.

What does being CarbonNeutral® certified mean for HP Managed Print Service customers?

HP MPS customers can rest assured that their HP printing solution is CarbonNeutral® certified.1 Besides offsetting 100% of the greenhouse gas emissions related to printing, HP MPS helps organizations reduce and offset the environmental impact of printing by:

Optimizing your fleet to reduce carbon emissions

Estimating the total carbon emissions from your HP-branded printing solution using HP’s proprietary Sustainable Impact Reporting and Analytics (SIRA) tool

25% Reduction in paper waste

13% resource efficiency improvement

12% decrease in ecosystem impacts

Click here to read more.

Learn more about HP’s Managed Print Cloud Services here. And for more information about HP’s Sustainable Impact click here.

Green IT

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As the trend to a borderless workplace accelerates, supporting work wherever it happens—whether at home or in the office—has become a critical need. And the demands on IT can be overwhelming.

Finding the right device with the right set of printing and scanning features to fit your employees’ needs is just the beginning. You’re also called upon to leverage the power of the cloud and keep ahead of evolving threats to your network—all while keeping devices serviced and supplied with ink and toner.

HP has services to help you remove friction from day-to-day workflows for employees, regardless of where they work. This means eliminating manual, time-intensive, and error-prone processes for end users, as well as back-office IT team members. Achieving greater productivity also allows teams to focus on more strategic business initiatives that drive growth and innovation.

Remotely manage your fleet

Simplify device onboarding with the HP Smart app

Stay productive with automatic supplies replenishment

Count on express exchange or next-businessday service

Get usage reporting in Device Control Center (DCC) and Strategic Business Reviews (SBR)

Manage your risk

Securely connect Flexworker devices to the cloud for telemetry and supplies ordering

Take advantage of HP Print Security Advisory Service

Get expert guidance from HP Security Consultants based on best practices for home and remote workers

Easily see and remediate HP Essential Security settings

Give at-home workers the print functionality they need

Depend on the world’s most secure printing with HP LaserJet Enterprise Managed Devices

Trust embedded device security features in HP OfficeJet and LaserJet Pro devices

Ship devices to home addresses

Count on a predictable rate for device support and supplies

Take advantage of flexible financing with leasing or direct purchase

Include flexworkers in your Managed Print Services contract for simple, monthly billing

Depend on best-fit devices for your flexworkers’ required page volume and print capabilities

Click here to read the full guide. To find out more about HP’s Managed Print Cloud Services click here.

HP

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While organizations respond to urgent demands to transition to the cloud, they may overlook the print environment. Even if printing is on IT’s radar, their time and resources are often barely enough to keep on top of day-to-day management tasks. There’s little time and not enough people for all current and new projects.

HP Managed Print Cloud Services helps you implement a comprehensive transition to the cloud. Designed to align to your print environment, you can count on HP to provide the right fit for your organization.

Elevate IT impact

Let HP manage your print environment so technical teams can focus on reinventing how the business works. HP can help optimize costs, maximize resources and personnel, and reduce the hassle of print management. Managed Print Cloud Services provides global, managed services for secure, always-on printing that encompasses your firmware, solutions, and servers. Proactive infrastructure and security monitoring with optimized upgrade strategies let you minimize downtime and service calls.

Help lower your technical debt

The key to game-changing digital transformation is pioneering, cloud-powered technology that lets you go further, faster. Let HP manage ongoing maintenance, monitoring, security, and reporting. With a cloud template that can be designed once and deployed globally, you can dynamically adapt and scale to meet the changing needs of your business. That translates to the ability to quickly deploy your print applications and environment to different locations. To help meet sustainability goals, migrating print solutions from on-premise data centers to the HP cloud can help keep your carbon footprint down.

Count on a full range of security solutions

A cloud strategy that is ahead of existing and emerging cyber threats empowers your business to make bold decisions and pivot to the future. Empower people to work in the way that best suits their needs, with authentication, job accounting, and pull-print solutions. HP Wolf Enterprise Security defends your network with layer after layer of hardened security atop the world’s most secure printers.1 Choose from Trusted to Zero Trust security architectures for your Managed Print Cloud Services implementation, and count on flexible options that can evolve with your business.

Click here to read the full guide. To find out more about HP’s Managed Print Cloud Services click here.

HP

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Anywhere work comes with all-around security risks. When HP moved its workforce of 70,000 employees and contractors to a hybrid model, the umbrella of devices it had to protect expanded exponentially.

HP had to ensure that they could:

Meet today’s rising security challenges

Guard employee data

Make layers of security transparent and automated Keep software up to date

Ensure security policy compliance

How HP achieved it

The HP CISO and Security team looked to their own extensive arsenal of services and chose the HP Adaptive Endpoint Management, HP Sure Click Enterprise, and HP Wolf Security components to protect its growing hybrid work environment.

Automated security policies

HP Adaptive Endpoint Management helps automate security updates from the cloud. When a cyberthreat is on the horizon, employees no longer have to wait until they are back on a corporate network—they can get the latest patches and upgrades from anywhere. Adaptive Endpoint Management enabled HP to rationalize its device management practices by streamlining policy management and using a corporate-ready device image.

Vigilant protection for end users

HP Sure Click Enterprise isolates key applications in their own micro-virtual containers—trapping and deleting risky programs, viruses, and malware as soon as the task is closed, keeping them from infecting the PC or network.

Built-in device protections

HP Wolf Security provides hardware-enforced full stack security that works below, in, and above the OS. IT departments are better able to improve lifecycle management as well as incident and disaster recovery while helping security teams minimize risk and increase team productivity—without interruption to employees.

Click here to read the full case study. To find out more about HP’s Workforce Security Solutions click here.

Remote Work, Security

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Each quarter HP’s security experts highlight notable malware campaigns, trends and techniques identified by HP Wolf Security. By isolating threats that have evaded detection tools and made it to endpoints, HP Wolf Security gives an insight into the latest techniques used by cybercriminals, equipping security teams with the knowledge to combat emerging threats and improve their security postures.

Discover the following highlights uncovered this quarter.

Threat actors continued to thrive off living-off-the-land tactics in Q3, abusing tools built into Windows to conduct their attacks. The HP Threat Research team identified a new malware campaign that relied entirely on living-off-the-land tools. The attackers impersonated a shipping company to spread Vjw0rm and Houdini script malware.2 3 But time may be up for these malware families, given the deprecation of VBScript announced by Microsoft in October 2023. We expect threat actors will shift to tools written in other interpreted languages like Batch and PowerShell in response.

The team identified a surge in the abuse of Excel add-in (XLL) files in Q3.5 Macro-enabled Excel add-in malware rose to the 7th most popular file extension used by attackers, up from 46th place in Q2. HP Wolf Security detected attackers trying to infect devices with Parallax RAT through malicious Excel add-ins masquerading as scanned invoices.

In Q3, HP Wolf Security detected a malware campaign targeting hotels in Latin America with macro-enabled PowerPoint add-ins. The presentations, sent via email, were disguised as information from a hospitality management software vendor.

HP uncovered attackers hosting fake remote access trojans (RATs) on GitHub, attempting to trick inexperienced cybercriminals into infecting their own PCs. The code repositories claim to contain full versions of a popular malware kit called XWorm that sells for up to $500 USD, but instead downloads and runs malware on the aspiring hacker’s machine.

Click here to read the full report. To find out more about HP’s Workforce Security Solutions click here.

Cybercrime, Security

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The enterprise workplace has changed significantly over the past few years with the rapid adoption of hybrid work. Organizations across all industries can leverage digital workspaces to implement hybrid work models that (1) provide employees with a superior user experience, (2) meet security, productivity, collaboration, and employee satisfaction goals for the business, and (3) are manageable for IT.

The way forward is implementing a digital workspace solution that can deliver a high-quality user experience for a wide variety of employee needs and keep business information secure. Digital workspaces closely replicate the on-premises experience when an employee is off-site or at home, so employees can continue to be productive wherever they want to work.

What is a digital workspace?

Digital workspaces allow employees to access their work in real-time, from anywhere they have a network connection and using any device. It encompasses virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), data centres, edge, workstations, and applications, whether onpremises or in the cloud, endpoints, collaboration technologies, management and administrative tools, as well as secure access policies and tools.

The virtual nature of digital workspaces makes them highly accessible—corporately managed devices that remain in an office space aren’t a requisite to securely access company data and applications.

 A digital workspace that lives on a cloud or on a server stack can be accessible on employee’s devices, Zero Clients, and Thin Clients.

Digital workspaces include collaboration features so employees and peers can work together on the same project—even on the same workspace—when they aren’t physically in the same space. They also allow users to share resources. Teams in the same city, or even around the world in different time zones, can leverage shared hosts and applications. To find out more on how to create secure, collaborative and productive digital workspaces click here. For more information on ensuring secure access to digital workspaces click here.

Remote Work

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As more organizations pivot to incorporating digital workspaces, IT will have to make important decisions around security. There has been an increase in cybersecurity incidents over the last few years. IT can’t rely on traditional or established security protocols. They need to be aware of the latest threats and the best ways to mitigate them.

Below are the best ways to ensure digital workspaces are secure when employees access them from wherever they work.

PCoIP technology

One of the best ways to secure digital workspaces is through software solutions that include their own additional security parameters. HP Anyware is based on the patented PCoIP remote display protocol that connects users to the resources they need to work wherever they are. Designed for security and performance, PCoIP technology is secured with AES 256 encryption which allows PCoIP traffic to meet the stringent security requirements set by governments.

Multi-factor authentication and Single Sign-On

 IT can install multi-factor authentication (MFA) protocols to protect access to digital workspaces. MFA adds multiple levels of protection when a user tries to access company data or applications. By verifying the identity of the user through login credentials and a third-party authentication app, MFA can safeguard against cybersecurity threats. HP Anyware is equipped with MFA protocols, as well as Single Sign-On, for additional verifications and to keep access to digital workspaces more secure.

Remote digital workspace administration

IT has a critical role in managing the security of digital workspaces. Alongside tracking updates to PCoIP technology and ensuring that MFA regulations are set, IT also needs to ensure that digital workspaces aren’t open to vulnerabilities. Turning off inactive connections, even if IT is working away from the digital workspace, is an important aspect of this role.

Zero Trust Architecture

Rather than technology, Zero Trust is a philosophy of ‘never trust, always verify’. It is a model for security that limits access to only verified users, devices, workloads and data. The Zero Trust strategy, by default, distrusts all entities and technologies, affords all entities the least privilege, and constantly monitors access to digital workspaces.

Register below to download the Ultimate Guide to Implementing Digital Workspaces with HP Anyware.

Endpoint Protection, Security

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When it comes to facilities, IT, staffing, and supply chain, businesses today need a whole new kind of blueprint to thrive in the new era of uncertainty.

Discover the five ways to help prepare for whatever is thrown your way while still meeting your desired business outcomes.

Workforce Experience

The whole purpose of gathering people in offices is so they can connect and interact; replicating this can be challenging when your workforce is distributed across multiple locations. Connectedness is about more than ongoing operations; it’s also about getting and keeping the best people.

IT Optimization

If the old style of blueprint was dogmatic, with a top-down structure offering little room to manoeuver, the new style of blueprint must embrace change and put people at the center. Give your staff the equipment they need to let them use the tools they’re already comfortable with, whether that’s a laptop, a tablet, or workstation.

Manageability

Nothing is more important than making sure that business can keep going whatever challenges arise. Today, enterprise IT’s mission has emerged not just as a vendor of services to internal corporate clients but as a full strategic partner in keeping the business running no matter where workers or customers may be.

Security Fortification

Whatever your security blueprint is, ensure it acknowledges the very real threats that are already occurring and likely to become more intense. That means having endpoints with built-in protection against the biggest threats and ensuring you have a mechanism to keep those endpoints up to date wherever they may be.

Sustainable Impact

Ensuring that technology is used in a way that aligns with your Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals is crucial for protecting the planet and creating sustainable working practices. By actively seeking out solutions that reduce your carbon footprint and promote environmentally responsible practices, organizations can make a positive impact on the world. Read the full guide from HP here.

To find out more about HP’s Workforce Solutions click here. To read more about HP’s Sustainable Impact click here. Discover more on HP’s Workforce Experience here. Learn about HP’s Workforce Security Solutions by visiting here. And find out more about HP’s Managed Device Services here.

Remote Work