In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, customers are seeking alternatives to the public cloud that offer the same flexibility and scalability, but with greater predictability in cost, performance, and control. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is emerging as the platform of choice. Today, nine of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies and 87 percent of Broadcom’s 10,000 largest customers have adopted VCF.
The journey to VCF adoption is supported by partners that play a critical role in helping customers modernize their infrastructure, operations, and security to achieve the outcomes that matter most. These partners must be deeply skilled in the pre-sales and post-sales capabilities to be invested in customers’ long term private cloud journey.
In my recent blog, Driving Success Together: Broadcom’s Partner Mission, I highlight three key areas where partner focus is essential to unlocking sustainable, predictable growth. A key way for partners to understand how to unlock value for the customer is the Partner Value Pyramid—a blueprint for driving customer success and future-proofing their journey to private cloud on VCF. This framework outlines what excellence looks like across the full lifecycle, from advising and architecting to deploying, managing, and optimizing outcomes over time.
The Partner Value Pyramid: A Blueprint for Customer Success
The journey to private cloud with VCF is not defined by a single transaction, it requires long-term partnership, continuous value delivery, and measurable business outcomes across the entire customer lifecycle. The Partner Value Pyramid provides a structured framework for partners to elevate their engagement from product-focused selling to a true platform, with a full-cycle advisory approach. This includes guiding customers through strategic decisions, architecting the right solutions, executing post-sales deployment and implementation, and helping them rethink how their infrastructure, operations, and teams function in a private cloud operating model. By adopting this consultative and execution-focused approach, partners position themselves as trusted advisors who drive transformation, ensure successful outcomes, and deliver lasting impact and stronger customer relationships well beyond the initial sale.
The Pyramid consists of five key levels, each representing a critical area of focus:
1. Environmental & Customer Intelligence
Partners have strong visibility into customer needs and bring invaluable insights to drive outcomes. They understand the customer’s application workloads running on VMware, hardware refresh cycles, and areas ripe for modernization, such as containerized development. This foundational knowledge is essential for identifying opportunities and driving modernization with the customer
2. Joint Account Strategy & Alignment
Partner collaboration with Broadcom is crucial to develop joint account strategies that align with the customer’s business priorities. By leveraging their expertise, partners can shape roadmaps that deliver meaningful outcomes for customers.
3. Adoption Status & Progression
Partners must take a candid look at the customer’s current state—what’s deployed in production, why it’s there, and what’s next. Where are the greatest opportunities for more value from this customer's investment? We rely on partner expertise to design a joint adoption plan with clear milestones and clear outcomes.
4. Cloud Operating Model
VMware Cloud Foundation provides the standardized, automated platform required to operate a true private cloud, but realizing its full value depends on adopting a cloud operating model on top of it. The cloud operating model defines how teams deliver, manage, secure, and consume IT services in a modern, cloud-like way—standardized services, automated lifecycle management, policy-driven governance, and shared processes across Dev, Ops, and Sec.
Transformation to this model requires higher-level engagement across the organization. C-level executive buy-in is essential to drive organizational change and break down long-standing departmental silos. Without this alignment, organizations risk remaining trapped in fragmented operational structures that limit the benefits of VCF and slow modernization. Partners play a critical role in guiding customers through this alignment and ensuring a successful transition.
5. Repatriate Workloads
While organizations want the speed, agility, and developer experience of the public cloud, many have grown frustrated with its unpredictability, volatile consumption-based costs, unexpected egress fees, performance variability, and heightened security or data-sovereignty concerns. As a result, cloud repatriation is accelerating. Customers are increasingly moving applications, data, and workloads back on-premises or into private clouds where they gain greater control, predictability, and governance without sacrificing the cloud experience their teams expect.
Cloud repatriation, returning workloads from public cloud environments to on-premises infrastructure or private clouds, is becoming a strategic priority for many organizations. Partners play a key role in guiding customers through this shift, helping them evaluate which workloads should move, designing the landing zone, and ensuring the private cloud delivers the automation, operations, and developer experience the business requires.
Partner Requirements Have Evolved
The market has shifted, the private cloud revolution is here, and Broadcom’s partners must now go far beyond transactional product sales. Today’s customers require guidance, architectural expertise, and a clear path to platform adoption and modernization. This evolution demands that partners develop deeper advisory, services, and implementation capabilities to drive end-to-end outcomes. Partners who embrace this vision and lead this transformation will be the ones who differentiate, grow, and ultimately succeed.
Broadcom Partner as Trusted Advisor
Our approach is simple yet powerful: Lead with VMware Cloud Foundation, drive adoption through services, and deliver measurable partner impact. The Partner Value Pyramid serves as a simplified but essential playbook for navigating the changing business environment and delivering maximum customer value. By focusing on customer intelligence, joint account strategies, adoption planning, cloud operating models, and workload repatriation, partners can position themselves as trusted advisors and drive sustainable growth.
Together, we can help customers modernize their infrastructure, achieve their goals, and unlock the full potential of VMware Cloud Foundation.
Learn more about the latest news regarding Broadcom's partner program here.