Across EMEA, customers are reassessing their cloud strategies with a sharper focus on cost control, operational resilience, and architectural simplicity. For many, this has prompted a shift away from fragmented approaches toward more intentional private and hybrid cloud models— where outcomes, not infrastructure sprawl, define success.
This reassessment has accelerated in recent months. High-profile public cloud outages, rising consumption-based costs, and tightening European regulations have highlighted the risks of over-reliance on hyperscale public cloud models. As a result, data sovereignty and workload placement have become board-level discussions, particularly as AI adoption introduces new data sensitivity, governance and compliance requirements.
At Broadcom, we see this shift clearly in our customer conversations. Organizations want fewer platforms, fewer vendors, and fewer handoffs. They want partners who can advise with confidence, architect with precision, and execute consistently across the entire customer lifecycle.
That reality has guided a set of deliberate actions we are taking across the EMEA partner ecosystem to improve how we serve our customers through our resale channel.
Customer Outcomes Require Focused, Capable Partners
The challenges customers face today are not abstract. They are specific, regional, and operational, including:
- Rising infrastructure and operational costs
- Increasing regulatory and industry-specific requirements
- Tool sprawl and increasing architectural complexity
- Pressure to modernize without disrupting critical systems
In Europe especially, regulatory frameworks such as DORA and NIS2 introduce country- and industry-specific compliance expectations that vary significantly across markets. Customers increasingly prefer to keep sensitive data within national borders, reinforcing demand for private and hybrid architectures that provide greater control, resilience, and transparency.
Addressing these challenges requires partners who can move beyond resale and provide real technical depth, platform expertise, and mature services capability. In regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, and healthcare, that expertise must also be deeply localized.
Success increasingly depends on partners who can start with a customer’s most immediate pain points, then guide them forward with a clear, outcome-driven modernization path, rather than selling disconnected products or one-off projects.
A Deliberate Shift to a Stronger Ecosystem
Over the past year, Broadcom has been clear and consistent globally: a smaller, highly skilled, and more accountable partner ecosystem delivers better outcomes for customers.
As Brian Moats, Senior Vice President, Global Commercial Sales and Partners, Broadcom, outlined in a blog earlier this year, optimizing the partner ecosystem is not about reducing opportunity—it is about raising the bar. Customers benefit when they engage with partners who are committed, invested, specialized and capable of delivering at scale.
In EMEA, we are now applying those same principles.
We are aligning our ecosystem around partners who demonstrate:
- Proven ability to transact and support VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)
- Meaningful technical and services investment
- Capability to manage customer lifecycle engagements, not just point product transactions
- Commitment to long-term customer success
This focus allows us to deliver greater consistency, higher quality, and better customer experiences across the region.
VCF as the Foundation for Simplicity, Sovereignty, and Cost Control
Customers are increasingly standardizing on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as a way to reduce complexity, consolidate tooling, and regain cost transparency and financial predictability.
VCF also enables customers to align infrastructure strategy with sovereignty and compliance requirements by supporting private and hybrid cloud deployments that keep data where it belongs, under the customer’s control, within the appropriate geographic and regulatory boundaries.
As a single, integrated platform that addresses infrastructure, operations, security, and automation, VCF provides a solution to the fragmented architectures many customers struggle to manage today. The result is not just technical simplification, but measurable business impact.
Partners play a critical role here. Helping customers move from a product-centric mindset to a platform-first approach requires strategic conversations, credible technical guidance, and clear financial justification.
To support those discussions, Broadcom has invested in tools such as Private Cloud Maturity and Optimization (PCMO), enabling partners to quantify total cost of ownership, operational efficiency, and ROI with precision, from licensing through ongoing operations.
Local Expertise, Technical Maturity, Real Execution
EMEA is not a single market in many respects, and our partner strategy reflects that reality.
The partners we are prioritizing bring local regulatory understanding, deep technical capability, and services maturity tailored to their markets. Across France, Germany, the UK, the Nordics, and beyond, we are seeing partners build dedicated VCF practices, invest in skills, and deliver early, repeatable customer success.
That success requires partners who can speak the localized language of compliance, understanding national regulations and industry-specific requirements, while also addressing universal customer priorities such as cost optimization, resilience, and security.
Broadcom’s partner programs such as Expert Advantage and Broadcom Knights further reinforce this model by recognizing and enabling partners who consistently demonstrate excellence in architecture, delivery, and customer outcomes.
Our expectation is clear: partners must understand the full value of VCF and help customers realize it—starting with customers’ urgent operational needs and expanding into broader platform adoption and lifecycle value over time.
Raising the Bar for the Next Phase of Growth
As demand for private and hybrid cloud continues to grow, so does the importance of partner quality over partner quantity.
The actions we are taking across the EMEA ecosystem reflect a long-term commitment to customers: fewer handoffs, deeper expertise, stronger accountability, and better results.
By focusing our partner ecosystem on those best positioned to deliver, we are creating a stronger foundation for customer success, and for sustainable growth across the region.
I look forward to sharing more partner driven customer outcomes as this next phase unfolds.
To learn more about how Broadcom and our partners are helping customers modernize with VMware Cloud Foundation, visit us here.