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Software development teams can transform or constrict a modern enterprise in today’s digital economy. As such, many organizations are starting to invest in enhancing the developer experience, understanding that a frictionless process can improve business outcomes and drive higher performance.

Organizations encounter friction when shifting gears to cloud and multi-cloud, especially as they scale – and amplified when coupled with the adoption of Kubernetes and open source.

Many organizations stumble into multi-cloud when autonomous business units within the company start using these technologies on their own, considering only their unique business needs (as they should) but typically without corporate standards top of mind, as each business unit dives in, islands of tech stacks, tooling, and processes form, creating development, security, and operational challenges.

A lack of holistic strategy towards tools, processes, talent, or management can create silos, inconsistencies and can create more manual hand-offs and longer wait times on the path to production. Companies cannot achieve the agility, cost savings, or performance benefits of multi-cloud. Instead of advancing their cloud objectives, they create unmanaged risks and add more friction to software delivery.

McKinsey studied the pipeline problem and noted that with proper execution, companies achieve “developer velocity” — namely speed — when they master the tools, culture, product management, and talent management. Of these, McKinsey explains, “best-in-class tools are the primary driver of developer velocity.”

“Companies that excel in providing the right tools, culture, product management, and talent management not only develop software faster but also deliver significantly stronger business outcomes,” concluded the McKinsey report. Companies that remove “points of friction and unleash the full potential of development talent can achieve 60% higher shareholder returns and 20% higher operating margins.”

Why haven’t more firms resolved their snowflake approach to software development and delivery issues with so much at stake?

For one thing, the landscape of software development has increased in complexity every year. Even tools that aim to provide more flexibility, such as Kubernetes and containers, have a significant learning curve and are only part of the puzzle. Many companies are yet to invest in the right tools, talent, or practices to harness multi-cloud and tame its management complexity.

Yet, looked at another way, multi-cloud provides a compelling opportunity for the Development, Security, and Operations teams to align and modernize their approach to building, managing, and securing cloud-native applications.

Three pillars to mastering multi-cloud application platforms

To master multi-cloud, reduce risk, and remove friction from development processes, we advise enterprises to develop their capabilities and resources in these three essential areas.

1 — platform teams: An evolution from siloed technology teams to a multidisciplinary platform team responsible for building and running a set of services and tools for developers to build and run applications that drive business revenue. They’re the glue that connects your development team, IT infrastructure and operations team, and security team, but they also manage the requirements from business stakeholders. A good platform team acts with a product mindset; treating their development teams as customers and managing their platform like an internal business within a business. 

A platform team functions most efficiently when it obtains visibility into all facets of DevSecOps — to make real-time adjustments to projects in the development pipeline. To accomplish this, a platform team requires a unified data management model that consolidates inputs from disparate sources, the ability to correlate disparate data to an application, and generate dashboards to share with key stakeholders.

A platform team measures what matters for the organization, including KPIs related to the performance and outcomes for the business lines they support, the adoption of the platform services, productivity and effectiveness of the developers using the platform, and metrics related to reliability and security compliance.

2 — cloud-native architecture standards: Many organizations begin their Kubernetes journey in the cloud with one of the many managed Kubernetes services available. This helps the process of getting started and after an initial learning curve, an app team can be up and running. Kubernetes and containers bring new layers of abstraction to the application environment that can improve resource utilization and separate additional infrastructure concerns from the business logic, enabling accelerated development and delivery cycles.

With multi-cloud Kubernetes use, organizations must consider the adoption of platform capabilities that are uniform across different technologies to provide a consistent developer interface, the standardization of templates, and secure supply chains lower the learning curve of Kubernetes best practices and operationalize DevSecOps practices. Consistent Lifecycle and policy management across disparate Kubernetes is needed for operational efficiency and compliance. These capabilities enable you to have a faster, and more secure path to production for your applications in a manner that is flexible and adaptable to your business.

3 — enforce guardrails: Achieving developer velocity is a crucial objective for a modern enterprise. But the real trick is accelerating software development without sacrificing security and compliance along the way. While good governance is an enabler, well-defined guardrails help to shift these security best practices left invisibly to the developer and make this leap possible. Guardrails ensure environments start with the right configurations from the moment they are provisioned.

Effective guardrails must be baked into every step of the cloud native application lifecycle. With policy-driven guardrails, DevSecOps focuses on rapidly detecting and remediating cloud vulnerabilities to strengthen the overall compliance, and security posture. Then, the focus turns to optimizing costs and better aligning cloud spending to application needs and business objectives.

Proactive governance

Today, 87% of enterprises report using two or more clouds, according to the VMware Research and Insights study from 2022. Kubernetes is the platform technology of choice for these deployments, with nearly all (98%) of respondents from VMware’s 2023 State of Kubernetes report experiencing operational benefits of Kubernetes. Kubernetes and multi-cloud have become the technology foundation for modern business to accelerate application development and delivery.

Investing in guardrails for proactive governance and a secure software supply chain lays the groundwork for frictionless app deployments. Establishing a platform team and adopting a product mindset will go a long way toward preparing your enterprise to succeed in a multi-cloud world. Beyond that, running a platform — like a product can increase developer velocity, leading to “meaningful performance improvements,” says McKinsey.

No matter how your firm arrives at multi-cloud, with the right tools, talent, and a product mindset, any company can make multi-cloud a long-term business success.

To learn more, visit us here.

Cloud Computing

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By Andy Nallappan, Chief Technology Officer & Head of Software Business Operations, Broadcom

This is a continuation of Broadcom’s blog series: 2023 Tech Trends That Transform IT. Stay tuned for future blogs that dive into the technology behind these trends from more of Broadcom’s industry-leading experts.

Multi-cloud is the future of enterprise IT. The evidence is overwhelming.

A recent report reveals that more than 80% of enterprises surveyed have a multi-cloud strategy and nearly that number (78%) already have workloads deployed in more than three public clouds. Enterprises are realizing the need to customize their cloud infrastructures to better fit their business needs. The continuing acceleration of that customization in the year ahead is why multi-cloud is one of the top technology trends transforming technology in 2023.

The reasons are not hard to discern. As organizations continue transitioning their networking and IT infrastructures to cloud, it is becoming hard to ignore the opportunities and benefits of a multi-cloud environment. A multi-cloud approach allows the flexibility to manage and protect data across different environments—private, public, and sovereign—as needed. Maintaining this freedom, choice, control, and agility is crucial for future growth and critical for maintaining compliance with regulatory and statutory requirements for enterprises operating at global scale.

Another factor contributing to multi-cloud deployments is evolving regulatory compliance, which is accelerating the sovereign cloud—a cloud environment housed within the jurisdiction. Europe has strict regulations that you’ve likely heard of, such as EBAG, DORA, IDT, and now recently introduced: ECR, the European Cyber Resilience Act. Multi-cloud deployments allow full flexibility to adjust to changes to regulatory changes.

And a final factor contributing to multi-cloud deployments is a business-driven initiative to accelerate the reduction of how many data centers a business is running. By consolidating and reducing the number of data centers, businesses set themselves up to quickly deliver on evolving customer and market demands through technology, especially technology bolstered by artificial intelligence. Businesses want to move quickly and effectively to the cloud, while managing costs and risks, without having to refactor their entire workload—especially back-end platforms and solutions that have been working well for decades.

One size does not fit all

There are several reasons why this trend to multi-cloud will accelerate in 2023. The reality is that being locked into a single cloud vendor, or a single type of cloud infrastructure does not offer the flexibility needed to control costs, maintain control over information, or the agility necessary to operate successfully in a world already growing bigger in providers—and evolving types—of clouds.

A multi-cloud environment avoids these pitfalls while enhancing the capabilities to move across public cloud, data centers, and edge infrastructures. Multi-cloud is also cost-effective. It provides enterprises with the freedom to select the best products and services for their business needs. In short, multi-cloud will become the inevitable, as well as ideal cloud networking environment for managing and supporting the decentralized and distributed resources, assets, services, and workforces that compose the real-world reality of our post-pandemic digital age.

A shifting conversation

 Another key driver of this trend in 2023 will be the transition of talking about cloud from a technology discussion to a business outcomes conversation. Rather than enterprises reinventing the wheel each time to create their own cloud, there is a growing awareness that time to value can be greatly accelerated by sharing key components of multi-cloud infrastructures. Key to this business-driven discussion is the acceptance and evolution of the idea some call industry cloud platforms or vertical industry clouds. These are multi-cloud infrastructures with built-in, modular functionality tailored to a specific vertical industry.

Vertical industries such as banking, healthcare, Telco, and manufacturing will lead this movement. It will allow them to share an agile platform already supported by a portfolio of baked-in, industry-specific, prepackaged business capabilities directly relevant for their individual industries. These modular components can then be easily customized or swapped in-or-out to fit the individual organization’s business operations or needs. It is this understanding that will shift the cloud conversation away from technology-first discussion to that of business outcomes first for its obvious potential value as a platform and driver of new business innovation.

Think of these multi-clouds as providing prefabricated industry-specific Lego pieces containing key functions that can be assembled or composed the way a customer wants or needs. Another way is to think of them as providing a cloud platform containing the kinds of built-in, but customizable capabilities a top CRM provider or HR software provider offer their customers. But on a much grander scale that goes far beyond any single vertical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.

Only multi-cloud infrastructures offer this kind of industry-specific or vertical cloud platform adaptability. Multi-cloud allows enterprises to make the leap from the cloud services with which we are all familiar to creating new cloud platforms with the agility to far more easily and quickly be adapted to new business opportunities, changing business circumstances, or technology innovations.

Adopting a business or industry multi-cloud model will also speed the transition to cloud for many organizations. It will allow those organizations to take advantage of the plug-and-play aspects of a multi-cloud’s prepackaged, modular components.

The future in multi-cloud

Industry-model multi-cloud infrastructures will offer many enterprises the best solution for a decentralized networking environment. The benefits of these industry-specific clouds include:

More adaptabilityMore business functionalityMore innovation

Multi-cloud is the future of enterprise IT. And when integrated with sovereign cloud, multi-cloud will allow organizations to deliver differentiated services at scale while remaining secure and in compliance with regulatory frameworks around the globe. Enterprises recognize that because of this, multi-cloud will help their organizations deliver stronger business value. It is the reason enterprises are accelerating their transition to multi-cloud infrastructures this year and why it is a top trend transforming IT in 2023.

To learn more about tech trends transforming IT in 2023, visit Broadcom’s blog.

About Andy Nallappan:

Broadcom

Andy is the Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations for Broadcom. He oversees the DevOps, SaaS Platform & Operations, and Marketing for the software business divisions within Broadcom.

IT Leadership, Multi Cloud

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Peter Zhou, President of Huawei’s IT Product Line, is the public face of data storage technologies at the Chinese telecoms to IT giant. At MWC 2023, in between meetings with many of the 2,500 Huawei clients who made the trip to Barcelona, Peter described Europe’s buoyant market as one of the drivers behind 40% year-on-year growth in Huawei’s international on-premise data storage revenues.

In Europe, Huawei envisages continuing rapid growth as enterprises re-tool their private clouds to deal with accelerating cloudification.

“IT technology has been developing very quickly in Europe,” says Peter. “People here have accepted the case for cloudification quicker than in other regions.”

Peter adds: “For the future evolution of multi-cloud, we definitely believe that we need to continue innovating, particularly in data storage.”

Enterprises are investing in on-premise infrastructure in order to keep pace with runaway data volumes, mitigate security threats and cope with the rise of container-based and serverless application architectures.

At MWC, Peter spent much of his time discussing Huawei’s new multi-cloud storage solution, which supports intelligent cross-cloud data tiering, cross-cloud data visibility and enhanced data mobility.

“This is a must,” Peter says, referring to the last item on the list. “The data in data storage has to support data mobility, sharing between multiple clouds.”

“If we have an application in the public cloud, it must be able to access data in private clouds, rather than copying data from on-premise to the public cloud, which really isn’t cost-effective.”

For Peter’s on-premise offerings, the innovation agenda is also being driven by spiraling volumes of data, which accounts for Huawei’s aggressive focus on hardware size reduction, compression technologies and decreasing energy consumption.

Other on-premise solutions for enterprise data centers unveiled at MWC included an industry- first unified disaster recovery solution based on Storage & Optical Connection Coordination (SOCC) and multi-layer ransomware protection that integrates networking and storage to deliver 99.9% accuracy.

Huawei already offers a full enterprise storage portfolio, covering data production, backup and archiving, as well tiered solutions for hot, warm and cold data. At MWC, however, Peter’s on-premise division announced that it will be broadening its focus to include small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

This is part of a company-wide effort, involving the roll-out of more than 200 new products and services for SMEs including cost-effective primary and back-up storage offerings based around the OceanStor Dorado 2000 and OceanProtect X3000.

Peter doesn’t foresee an end to on-premise demand.

He says: “People may think the public cloud is expanding and that business in the on-premise data center is shrinking. People have that kind of worry. But the real results show that the facts are different.”

“In the beginning, people choose public cloud infrastructure, but then they become more rational in terms of the cost and the return. And they start to think about the future evolution of their technology needs.”

According to Peter, that’s precisely where European enterprises find themselves: investing in on-premise storage upgrades to future-proof their multi-cloud strategies.

“We think there’s a big change happening in Europe,” he adds. “The largest enterprises will be running multiple private clouds alongside multiple public clouds. That’s the reality.”

Find out more about Huawei’s MWC program here.

Data Management

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Multi-cloud environments offer significant business benefits from increasing agility to improving efficiency. The challenge, however, is that each cloud sits in an isolated silo with its own development and operating model, taxonomy, services, APIs and management tools. This lack of consistency across clouds forces companies to manage their multi-cloud environments through a patchwork of off-the-shelf, custom-built and native cloud service provider tools, which often require specialized developer and operator teams and skill sets to use. The lack of consistency across clouds also increases security risks.

Early on, VMware recognized the need to unify cloud environments. That’s why we created VMware Cross-Cloud services, our portfolio of services for application development, cloud management, cloud and edge infrastructure, security and networking, and Anywhere Workspace solutions. These services are built on a seamless abstraction layer that spans clouds, enabling organizations to build, deploy, run, manage, secure and access apps and infrastructure in a consistent way.

download whitepaper

Understanding Multi-Cloud Services

VMware and other software vendors have seen the same industry challenges of multi-cloud environments, and in response have released services to address various aspects of these challenges. For instance, earlier this year VMware CTO Kit Colbert discussed this very issue with the head of strategic partnerships at Snowflake, which is tackling the issue of managing data in a multi-cloud environment.

Multi-cloud services is our proposed nomenclature to address comprehensive multi-cloud challenges. As we define it, a multi-cloud service provides a consistent API, object model, identity management and other core functions across clouds, and it runs in one or more of the following scenarios: 

On a single cloud but supports interactions with at least two different clouds.On multiple clouds and supports interactions with at least two different clouds.On any cloud or edge, even in disconnected mode, and basic operations are fully automated.

VMware sees five categories of multi-cloud services: application services, infrastructure services, security services, end-user services and data plane services. These are broad categories, and over time we expect that our industry, collectively, will define more granular service categories as well as entirely new services.  

VMWare

In the multi-cloud services model, data centers, private clouds, public clouds and edge locations are verticals, and multi-cloud services are horizontals, providing functionality across these locations. These horizontal capabilities integrate with and complement the native services of each cloud while providing the consistency and standardization that development, operations and security teams need.

Benefits of Multi-Cloud Services

Organizations can use multi-cloud services to abstract and standardize cloud infrastructure and operations, development and security capabilities into one platform to reduce or eliminate the complexity of individually building or consuming the equivalent native services from multiple clouds. Some of the benefits include:

The business can realize quicker time to market and quantifiable improvements in app performance, efficiency and security. Operators can deploy, manage and monitor apps and container infrastructure in the same way for every cloud. This can minimize the need for specialized teams and skill sets when working with specific clouds.Developers can write apps using their preferred framework without worrying about the infrastructure or the cloud on which it runs.Security teams can apply policies consistently to every cloud and app. Companies in regulated industries can meet their unique sovereign cloud requirements and maintain jurisdictional control while achieving cutting-edge transformation at scale.

Learn More About Multi-Cloud Services

For a deeper dive into multi-cloud services, read VMWare’s white paper.For additional information please click here.

VMware

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How are modern CIOs making an impact with multi-cloud? A recently released VMware report, “CIO Essential Guidance: Modernizing Applications in a Multi-Cloud World,” outlines these four key factors that influence success:

Drive Developer Velocity

The best applications are created by the most talented developers, so it’s crucial to attract and retain the best talent. Taking it a step further, according to a recent Forrester poll, 69% of business leaders agreed that a good Developer Experience (DevEx) results in a better customer experience (CX).1 In fact, it’s clear that DevEx directly impacts CX: 45% of enterprise IT executives report that their dev teams push software releases on a monthly or faster pace (on average).2

With so much at stake, it’s critical to enable your developers to do what they do best: code. But all too often, barriers prevent this from happening. Cumbersome legacy platforms and tools slow down developers, which is why CIOs need to remove friction from the underlying development infrastructure and create an environment where teams can focus on achieving outcomes.

This may include creating agile workflows and automating manual processes as well as handoffs, provisioning and even meetings and paperwork. Adopting a cross-cloud development platform that offers the programs and codes your developers prefer, including pre-selected open-source products, will also elevate velocity, improve DevEx and unleash innovation.

VMware

Embrace Unified Cloud Management

Despite all the advantages of multi-cloud development environments, if you can’t easily manage your cloud estate, you’re not reaping the full benefits. You could be underutilizing resources from one cloud provider, while maxing out on another. Moreover, lack of visibility means greater risk.

VMWare

A successful strategy for overcoming these types of challenges is to choose the best cloud provider for each app – whether it’s an application platform for developers, an observability app for risk management, automation for operations, or something else — yet manage all clouds as if they were one, using a single platform. This approach reduces operational complexity and presents opportunities for greater governance, cost savings and risk management. 

Shift Security Left

Shifting security left – meaning building in features that bolster security across the entire app pipeline, from the build phase all the way through deployment and optimization – is essential in today’s complex threat landscape. This approach, combined with a unifying security platform and modern development principles, reduces risks and allows you to identify vulnerabilities and issues faster.

VMWare

When security management controls reside on a central platform, CIOs can better manage risk,compliance, and more across their overall cloud strategy – spanning entire application development and operations processes.

Take a Platform-as-a-Product Approach

Unifying platforms are vitally important to the success of your modern apps in a multi-cloud world. The operation of these platforms should be of the utmost importance, seeing as they are the product that keeps the company running.

If you view your unifying multi-cloud platforms as drivers of innovation, growth and data protection, and run them as a product, you can reimagine the way you prioritize and manage your apps and cloud estate. With a Platform-as-a-Product approach, it’s easier to keep your focus on the big picture.

Bringing It All Together

With almost 75% of businesses operating across multiple public clouds 5, it’s become clear that efforts to modernize need to be executed strategically. CIOs who’ve enjoyed success in this area are realizing cost savings, revenue growth, and improved innovation. They have taken the time to standardize functions across clouds, chosen the clouds that best meet the needs of their apps, and operated unifying platforms that maintain seamless business control over multiple cloud providers. They have also improved DevEx to make the best use of one of their greatest assets: their Dev team.

For more ways to influence multi-cloud success, download the complete report: CIO Essential Guidance: Modernizing Applications in a Multi-Cloud World

Learn more by clicking here.

[1] Taking it a step further, according to a recent Forrester poll, 69% of business leaders agreed that a good Developer Experience (DevEx) results in a better customer experience (CX).

[2] In fact, it’s clear that DevEx directly impacts CX: 45% of enterprise IT executives report that their dev teams push software releases on a monthly or faster pace (on average).

VMware

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Experts reveal that by 2027, cloud adoption will be mainstream, with 90% of enterprises implementing some kind of cloud strategy. What’s key is that, in the process, the cloud won’t just be a technology disruptor — it will be a business disruptor. 

What does this mean for your business? If you don’t tackle the challenges associated with cloud adoption today, you will be at a competitive disadvantage tomorrow. 

Cloud services can present a huge advantage for organizations pursuing digital and network transformations. Leaders see the cloud as a path to modernize their IT infrastructure, so they can achieve greater flexibility and agility, lower costs of operations, faster time to market, and heightened competitive advantage — just to name a few.

However, for each of these major benefits, there’s also an inherent set of obstacles. Let’s break down the benefits and the associated roadblocks that can derail your success:

Greater flexibility. Cloud services can be accessed from pretty much anywhere there’s connectivity. However, this user flexibility adds proliferating complexity for the network operations (NetOps) teams responsible for tracking and managing user experiences. Quite simply, instead of managing a single network for an employee base of 10,000, they’re now effectively managing 10,000 networks.More agility. Cloud services undoubtedly offer flexibility in deployment. However, these diverse services can vary substantially among cloud providers and they can be time consuming and expensive to manage.Lower costs of operations. While cloud providers can offer economies of scale, those advantages can quickly be eradicated if businesses incur costly outages and performance issues, and NetOps teams are saddled with lengthy troubleshooting efforts. Faster time to market. Cloudservices can provide businesses with a faster way to monetize new market offerings. However, without an effective way to ensure optimized availability and service levels, launching these new offerings can simply be too risky. Competitive advantage. All of the above advantages can translate to a competitive advantage — as long as there aren’t any failures. While cloud service providers may promise continuous, 24×7 availability, that’s not the reality. If you doubt that’s the case, I’d just point you to this article: The 15 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2022.

Luckily, analysts predict that over the next five years, service providers will offer cloud-native solutions that address many key management and monitoring challenges. The question then becomes, do you wait five years for these advancements, or do you look for a solution today? The reality is that some software vendors have cracked the code in removing the blind spots associated with running services in the cloud. 

Here are the top five capabilities to look for:

High-scale, active testing that delivers end-to-end visibility, including beyond the edge of your enterprise network. Visibility into the impact of issues on users and application performance, enabling more intelligent prioritization and faster response.Synthetic transaction monitoring that delivers increased visibility into application performance, and how it affects the overall user experience.Trusted root cause analysis that enables your teams to identify the source of an issue, even if the problem arises in cloud, SaaS, or ISP networks. Actionable insights into cloud network performance metrics like voice/data loss, packet loss, latency, capacity, and more. 

With these insights, your NetOps team can quickly and confidently determine where the issue resides, and whether it’s the responsibility of the internal team, the cloud provider, or other service provider. 

Digital transformation success depends on modern architectures like cloud, SaaS, SD-WAN, and more. However, unless you have full visibility into the performance of these transformational technologies, your user experiences will suffer. In the process, your brand will take a hit and your competitive advantage won’t be an advantage for long.

Learn more here.

Multi Cloud

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By Brian McNeice, Vice President Federal Sales, Broadcom Software

Federal government agencies in the United States must navigate a number of considerations when evaluating solutions from cloud service providers. At Broadcom, we also understand the importance of choice and flexibility when making strategic cloud investments that won’t disrupt the mission-critical daily operations of these agencies. With a solid federal footprint, leading solutions, and customer-first reputation, Broadcom has a proven track record of supporting successful cloud transformation missions across critical defense operations and government service delivery.

Federal leaders — from members of Congress to executive agency chief information officers (CIOs) — are continuing to modernize their information technology (IT) infrastructures and recognizing there is no “one-size-fits-all” public cloud. As a result, the move toward multi-cloud architectures to serve agency missions is a central part of federal IT modernization, as the Pentagon’s recent $9 billion multi-cloud contract award to Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Amazon clearly demonstrates.

As a long-term supplier to the U.S. government, including customers related to our national security, Broadcom is committed to serving the federal market. And, following the close of our pending acquisition of VMware, we will continue to support national IT modernization objectives while delivering even more flexibility, simplicity and choice to the growing number of federal agencies that are fully embracing multi-cloud architectures.

Simplifying challenges

Cloud computing is not without challenges. Cloud platforms have the incentive to lock customers into their own public cloud. Federal customers often receive large invoices from public cloud companies at the end of the year that contain overages and hidden charges, which inevitably forces difficult (and sometimes avoidable) discussions.

Multi-cloud, however, is not just mission-effective, but cost-effective as well, allowing federal agencies the freedom to shop around to determine the best and most transparent fit for their own environments. Critically, VMware’s leading platform allows enterprises that flexibility to modernize applications, manage software and services, and secure data, whether it be on-premises, public clouds, private clouds, or hybrid workspaces.

Following the transaction close, solutions from the combined Broadcom and VMware will enable customers to create the multi-cloud environment they want — across public clouds, data centers and the edge — all while increasing choice and reducing risks around lock-in, control over data, critical operations, and rising costs. We expect this stronger multi-cloud capability to enhance Broadcom solutions across our mission-critical software portfolio, which today already supports some of the most complex hybrid environments for a vast number of federal agencies.

The future of cloud

Even amid further modernization, it is clear many federal agencies intend to keep some form of on-premises computing. This means future IT and data management models will take a hybrid approach. Deloitte predicts that within five years more than 40% of organizations’ workloads will run in the public cloud, leaving the remainder either on premises, private cloud, or some hybrid computing environment.

Regardless of an agency’s desired approach, solutions fueled by the proposed Broadcom-VMware combination will allow customers to operate securely, efficiently and cost-effectively in any multi-cloud environment, including by creating private clouds and switching between public cloud vendors at will. This choice gives customers real options on the best ways to store, manage and secure their data, which means federal agencies won’t be penalized for deciding to use the public cloud or limited in the choices that are best for their organizations.

The multi-cloud ecosystem

President and CEO of Broadcom Hock Tan previously shared that the current and future priorities of Broadcom customers in the U.S., UK, Germany and France included a heavy focus on multi-cloud. He explained that Broadcom has long “recognized that the future of enterprise IT is multi-cloud — the ability to distribute applications and services across a combination of clouds. It’s one of the many reasons Broadcom solutions complement what VMware does in the multi-cloud space across private, public, edge and sovereign clouds today.” This feedback from customers around the world about what they’re focusing on also applies to the increased importance of the multi-cloud ecosystem for federal agencies here in the United States.

As an engineering-first company, Broadcom is committed to innovating leading-edge technology, ensuring successful deployments of our solutions, and delivering value for our customers to drive growth. Our business model is predicated on adding long-term value and improving our products over time. We realize the value of a multi-cloud strategy as part of the overall effort to modernize the federal IT infrastructure. A stronger VMware, backed by Broadcom, means that our customers in the federal space can deliver on this multi-cloud mission successfully while also enjoying the world-class security that will enable them to accelerate innovation for all their applications.

Learn how Broadcom plans to support important agency missions here.

Cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements

This communication relates to a proposed business combination transaction between Broadcom Inc. (“Broadcom”) and VMware, Inc. (“VMware”).  This communication includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and Section 27A of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended. These forward-looking statements include but are not limited to statements that relate to the expected future business and financial performance, the anticipated benefits of the proposed transaction, the anticipated impact of the proposed transaction on the combined business, the expected amount and timing of the synergies from the proposed transaction, and the anticipated closing date of the proposed transaction.  These forward-looking statements are identified by words such as “will,” “expect,” “believe,” “anticipate,” “estimate,” “should,” “intend,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “aim,” and similar words or phrases.  These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and beliefs of Broadcom management and current market trends and conditions. 

These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that are outside Broadcom’s control and may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, including but not limited to: the effect of the proposed transaction on our ability to maintain relationships with customers, suppliers and other business partners or operating results and business; the ability to implement plans, achieve forecasts and meet other expectations with respect to the business after the completion of the proposed transaction and realize expected synergies; business disruption following the proposed transaction; difficulties in retaining and hiring key personnel and employees due to the proposed transaction and business combination; the diversion of management time on transaction-related issues; the satisfaction of the conditions precedent to completion of the proposed transaction, including the ability to secure regulatory approvals on the terms expected, at all or in a timely manner; significant indebtedness, including indebtedness incurred in connection with the proposed transaction, and the need to generate sufficient cash flows to service and repay such debt; the disruption of current plans and operations; the outcome of legal proceedings related to the transaction; the ability to complete the proposed transaction on a timely basis or at all; the ability to successfully integrate VMware’s operations; cyber-attacks, information security and data privacy; global political and economic conditions, including cyclicality in the semiconductor industry and in Broadcom’s other target markets, rising interest rates, the impact of inflation and challenges in manufacturing and the global supply chain; the impact of public health crises, such as pandemics (including COVID-19) and epidemics and any related company or government policies and actions to protect the health and safety of individuals or government policies or actions to maintain the functioning of national or global economies and markets; and events and trends on a national, regional and global scale, including those of a political, economic, business, competitive and regulatory nature.

These risks, as well as other risks related to the proposed transaction, are included in the registration statement on Form S-4 and proxy statement/prospectus that has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) in connection with the proposed transaction.  While the list of factors presented here is, and the list of factors presented in the registration statement on Form S-4 are, considered representative, no such list should be considered to be a complete statement of all potential risks and uncertainties.  For additional information about other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements, please refer to Broadcom’s and VMware’s respective periodic reports and other filings with the SEC, including the risk factors identified in Broadcom’s and VMware’s most recent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Annual Reports on Form 10-K.  The forward-looking statements included in this communication are made only as of the date hereof.  Neither Broadcom nor VMware undertakes any obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances, except as required by law.

No offer or solicitation

This communication is not intended to and shall not constitute an offer to buy or sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any securities, or a solicitation of any vote or approval, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction.  No offering of securities shall be made, except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of Section 10 of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended.  

Additional information about the transaction and where to find it

In connection with the proposed transaction, Broadcom has filed with the SEC a registration statement on Form S-4 that includes a proxy statement of VMware and that also constitutes a prospectus of Broadcom.  Each of Broadcom and VMware may also file other relevant documents with the SEC regarding the proposed transaction.  The registration statement was declared effective by the SEC on October 3, 2022 and the definitive proxy statement/prospectus has been mailed to VMware shareholders. This document is not a substitute for the proxy statement/prospectus or registration statement or any other document that Broadcom or VMware may file with the SEC.   INVESTORS AND SECURITY HOLDERS ARE URGED TO READ THE REGISTRATION STATEMENT, PROXY STATEMENT/PROSPECTUS AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS THAT MAY BE FILED WITH THE SEC, AS WELL AS ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS TO THESE DOCUMENTS, CAREFULLY AND IN THEIR ENTIRETY IF AND WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN OR WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION.  Investors and security holders may obtain free copies of the registration statement and proxy statement/prospectus and other documents containing important information about Broadcom, VMware and the proposed transaction once such documents are filed with the SEC through the website maintained by the SEC at http://www.sec.gov.  Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by Broadcom may be obtained free of charge on Broadcom’s website at https://investors.broadcom.com.  Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by VMware may be obtained free of charge on VMware’s website at ir.vmware.com.

ec.gov.  Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by Broadcom may be obtained free of charge on Broadcom’s website at https://investors.broadcom.com.  Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by VMware may be obtained free of charge on VMware’s website at ir.vmware.com.

About Brian McNeice, Vice President Federal Sales, Broadcom Software:

Broadcom Software

Brian has worked in the software and hardware industry across EMEA and North America for the last 20+ years. For the last 7 years he undertaken leadership rolls within the Federal team helping Broadcom’s customers deliver against their missions.

IT Leadership, Multi Cloud

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Over the last decade, many organizations have turned to cloud technologies on their journey to become a digital business. The advantages of multi-cloud are well-documented: efficiency, flexibility, speed, agility, and more. Yet without consistent, comprehensive management across all clouds – private, hybrid, public, and even edge – the intended benefits of multi-cloud adoption may backfire. Increasingly, multi-cloud operations have become a priority for organizations to successfully negotiate cloud adoption.

Today, not only are competitors more aggressive and margins tighter, but partners, customers, and employees also have higher expectations and greater demands. As organizations continue to adapt and accelerate service delivery, they need to look to modern management solutions to simplify and speed  access to the infrastructure and application services teams need, when they need them – without increasing business risk. By deploying solutions that offer comprehensive capabilities with a common control plane, organizations can unify their multi-cloud operations to improve infrastructure and application performance, gain visibility into costs, and reduce configuration and operational risks.

Multi-Cloud Management Challenges

Almost every digital business today faces the issue of complexity when it comes to managing its multi-cloud operations. As organizations have moved away from managing single data centers to managing hybrid and native public clouds, the scope and scale of management have exploded into countless moving parts. Organizations can face complexity due to siloed infrastructure, user access policies, multiple APIs, billing, and lack of a formal operations plan that ensures processes and security remain consistent across multiple clouds.

With so many moving parts, organizations can also face siloed teams that in many cases have to contend with different cloud constructs, including different definitions of the infrastructure services provided by those clouds and different policies for security and compliance. In addition, teams often deploy different tools to manage their various clouds. A fragmented approach to operational priorities for cloud services makes it difficult to get a holistic view of how an organization uses cloud services, shares best practices, and ensures sufficient governance. Not only can disconnected operations impede an organization’s ability to run efficiently, but also impact their ability to troubleshoot problems and recover from outages quickly. Siloed teams and the sprawl of management solutions can also result in a lack of visibility into cloud costs.

As we enter an uncertain market in 2023, organizations face increasing pressure to control their cloud spending. Complexity is the enemy of cost optimization. As a result of different pricing structures across different cloud provider services and siloed teams, organizations are often struggling to predict future spend. In fact, according to a recent VMware study, more than 41% of organizations want to optimize their existing use of cloud to save on costs.

The Benefits of Unifying Multi-Cloud Operations

As organizations mature in their multi-cloud management strategies, they increasingly recognize that success depends on having comprehensive visibility. Organizations cannot manage what they can’t see. Although management solutions have been around for a very long time, comprehensive visibility has yet to be fully appreciated or achieved by businesses.

Cloud management powers your cloud operating model by helping you manage, control, and secure your cloud environments. A unified approach to multi-cloud management enables consistent and seamless operations across clouds, simplifying cloud adoption, streamlining app migrations, and accelerating modernization. An effective, efficient cloud operating model today requires a modern management solution such as VMware Aria. By bringing together a comprehensive visual map of multi-cloud environments with actionable management insights, VMware Aria enables organizations to leverage end-to-end intelligent operations across clouds to improve performance, lower costs and reduce risk.

As we enter a year of uncertainty, agility is the key to resilience and growth, and no matter where organizations are at in their cloud journey, a cloud operating model rolled out with modern, comprehensive, multi-cloud management solutions will bring consistency and efficiency to managing all types of clouds. More importantly, it will allow business leaders to quickly adapt, respond, and innovate on the fly which will prove critical to staying competitive.

To learn more, visit us here.

Cloud Computing

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , ,

IT Operations management (ITOM) – a framework that gives IT teams the tools to centrally monitor and manage applications and infrastructure across multi-premise environments – has been the foundation of enterprise IT infrastructure and applications for the last 30 years. It has been the backbone that ensures technology stacks are operating optimally to provide timely business value and keep employees engaged and productive by maintaining the availability of core applications. But the recent acceleration of digital transformation across global industries and emergence of multi-cloud environments has introduced a new level of complexity.

While flexibility, elasticity, and ease of use are benefits that make starting with the cloud an enticing prospect, ongoing operation and management can quickly become difficult to oversee. As the business scales across infrastructure and applications deployments in a multi-cloud environment, so does the complexity inherent in diverse cloud operating models and tools, and distributed application architecture and deployment. Many IT professionals also lack technical or management skills in these areas.

According to a recent VMware survey of tech executives and their priorities for digital momentum, 73% reported a push to standardize multi-cloud architectures. The digital transformation and transition to multi-cloud environments to bring the best technology stacks that unlock business value will be a journey for most global enterprises in the coming years. The key is how to empower cloud-focused or cloud-native technology teams to realize the full potential of their transformational investments in multi-cloud environments.

This prompts a key question: is ITOM still valid when it comes to managing enterprise technology stacks that are increasingly categorized as multi-cloud environments?

IT operators for years had their favorite tools to manage infrastructure, applications, databases, networks, and more to support the needs of their business. But with the growing workload migration to multi-cloud environments, IT pros are now scrambling between siloed operations tools and cloud-specific tools provided by the key hyperscalers – AWS, Azure, or Google – for specific use cases. This tool sprawl is often exacerbated by the enterprises’ desire to pick the best cloud platform based on the problem that needs to be resolved. For a .NET based application migration to the cloud, for example, Azure might be the better choice, while an AI/ML large data lake analysis could be best suited to run on Google Cloud.

This is where ITOM is evolving to bring a holistic and comprehensive view across multiple disciplines of multi-cloud infrastructure and applications, integrating best practices from cost, operations, and automation management principles along with connected data. ITOM has been leveraged for decades in enterprise on-premises environments to bring disparate, federated, and integrated tools together to operate in a secure way. The key to success in accelerating digital transformation in multi-cloud consumption era is to have complete visibility of the environment, automation of mundane tasks, and proactive operations that utilize connected data from multiple domains in near real-time to drive preventive and proactive insights. This is possible to achieve with an integrated platform that brings different domains of operations, costs, and automation on a single integrated data platform.

There are different ITOM incumbents trying to “cloudify” their current solutions by tucking AIOps into the mix and integrating with application performance management (APM) offerings. On the other hand, there are also new market disrupters joining the race to provide a single integrated solution for the enterprises that unify multiple domains and data together to provide visibility, operations, cost, optimization, and automation across multi-cloud environments. All these scenarios suggest ITOM will solidify itself as even more relevant in cloud and modern IT operations management now and in the future – but to maximize its value, IT teams must move from cloud chaos to cloud smart management.

There are three primary characteristics of a cloud-smart IT operations management solution enterprises should look for:

Platform and API-based Solutions: Look for solutions that bring a set of common and integrated services together to monitor, observe, manage, optimize, and automate across infrastructure and apps. By using solutions that take a platform and API-first approach, IT teams are empowered to technology-proof their investments from a state of continuous invention and reinvention of the enterprise’s technology stacks and solutions. These types of offerings also help teams to connect the old legacy technology with more modern solutions as they progress along their digital transformation journeys while maintaining and growing their business.Integrated Data-driven Operations: A good ITOM solution should provide data-driven intelligence across multiple data domains to inform proactive decisions that leverage AIOps 2.0 principles. – AIOps must take a data-driven automation-first and self-service approach to truly provide value that frees resources to drive value-based development and delivery instead of chasing reactive problems. Global digital businesses are operating in multi-cloud environments, at the edge, and everywhere in between alongside the people, processes, and things that provide contextual customer experience. CloudOps will further provide rich diverse data to turn contextual connected data into business insights. It can’t manage an old school events-based command center but instead provides context across distributed and connected layers of technology by processing diverse volumes and variety of data that can be observed through business KPIs to drive actions to resolution. This will enable the modern digital businesses to constantly optimize the network and make informed decisions eliminating mundane manual tasks to improve productivity and innovation.Continuous Consumptions, Agility, and Control: We are moving from a static on-premises environment to dynamic cloud environments in the digital business, leveraging ephemeral workflows. This is where the right tools will drive automation of repetitive mundane tasks, enable governance and controls on cost, usage, and policy for the ever-changing business needs that demand elastic resources, data driven process accommodation, dynamic configurations, and consumption pricing.

The world of multi-cloud, edge, and on-premises are here to stay to drive the digital transformation journey of the enterprise. However, the pendulum of workloads moving between those discrete environments will continue to shift as business, compliance, and governance requirements change. ITOM and ITOps approaches are more relevant than ever in the world of multi-cloud hybrid environments with distributed ephemeral workloads (as they once were on on-premises environments). Still, it’s imperative that these operations management frameworks evolve with changing needs of business to ensure they’re able to simplify complex distributed technology stacks and cumbersome manual processes.

The goal is to drive contextual observable insights that lead to optimized usage and consumptions-based cultures by connecting different functions of business users, technology developers, and operators while enhancing complete end-to-end visibility of technology architectures. Only then can an organization benefit from modern ITOM that enables continuous change, compliance, and optimization to support a vibrant global business and its customers.

To learn more, visit us here.

Cloud Computing, IT Leadership

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Organizations that have embraced a cloud-first model are seeing a myriad of benefits. The elasticity of the cloud allows enterprises to easily scale up and down as needed. In practice, rather than commit to just one cloud service in today’s world of more distributed organizations due to Covid-19, many enterprises prefer to have multiple cloud solutions they source from a variety of vendors.

The cloud also helps to enhance security, improves insight into data, and aids with disaster recovery and cost savings. Cloud has become a utility for successful businesses. Around 75% of enterprise customers using cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) have been predicted to adopt a deliberate multi-cloud strategy by 2022, up from 49% in 2017, according to Gartner.

“Businesses don’t want to be locked into one particular cloud,” says Tejpal Chadha, Global Head, Digitate SaaS Cloud & Cyber Security. “They want to run their applications on different clouds so they’re not dependent on one in case it were to temporarily shut down. Multi-cloud has really become a must-have for organizations.”

Yet, at the same time, companies that tap into these multi-cloud solutions are opening themselves up to additional, and potentially significant, security risks. They become increasingly vulnerable in an age of more sophisticated, active cyberhackers.

To address security risks, cloud services have their own monitoring processes and tools that are designed to keep data secure. Many offer customers basic monitoring tools for free. But if companies want a particularly robust monitoring service, they often must pay added fees. With multiple clouds, this added expense can be significant.

“The cost goes up when you have to have specific monitoring tools for each cloud,” Chadha says. “Monitoring also needs to be instantaneous or real-time to be effective.”

Organizations using multi-cloud solutions are also susceptible to cloud sprawl, which happens when an organization lacks visibility into or control over its cloud computing resources.The organizationtherefore ends up with excess, unused servers or paying higher rates than necessary.

For enterprises safeguarding their multi-cloud solutions, a better tactic is to use just one third-party overarching tool for all clouds – one that monitors everything instantaneously. ignio™, the award-winning enterprise automation platform from AIOps vendor Digitate, does just that.

ignio AIOps, Digitate’s flagship product, facilitates autonomous cloud IT operations by tapping into AI and machine learning to provide a closed-loop solution for Azure and AWS, with versions for Google Cloud (GCP) and private clouds also coming soon. With visibility and intelligence across layers of cloud services, ignio AIOps provides multi-cloud support by leveraging cloud-native technologies and APIs. It also provides actionable insights to better manage your cloud technology stack.

ignio is unique in that it cuts across multiple data centers, both private and public clouds, and seamlessly handles everything  in a single window. It gets a bird’s eye view of the health of a company’s data centers and clouds. Then, ignio continuously monitors, predicts, and takes corrective action across clouds while also automating previously manual tasks, which ignio calls “closed-loop remediation.” The closed-loop remediation enables companies to automate actions for both remediation, compliance, and other essential CloudOps tasks.

“The ignio AIOps software first comes in and, in the blueprinting process, gives a holistic view of what companies have in their universe,” Chadha says. “We call that blueprinting or discovery. Then, we help automate tasks. We’re completely agnostic when it comes to monitoring or taking corrective action, or helping increase automation across all of these clouds.”

As Digitate ignio customers automate processes and reduce manual IT efforts, they’re finding they’re saving money — some millions of dollars a year. For many companies, tasks that once took three days now take only an hour.

“The biggest benefits are that less manual work is ultimately needed, and then there’s also the costs savings,” Chadha says. “Enterprises using this tool are managing their multi-cloud estate much more efficiently.”

To learn more about Digitate ignio and how Digitate’s products can help you thread the multi-cloud needle, visit Digitate.

IT Leadership