VMware by Broadcom’s global channel chief Brian Moats talks to CRN about VMware’s leg-up over the competition when it comes to combating hardware supply chain complaints, memory and compute costs, as well as his message to VMware channel partners.
VMware by Broadcom’s global channel chief Brian Moats told CRN that VMware Cloud Foundation is winning customers via its memory tiering technology, cost savings on third-party tools and AI security features.
Moats said customers see the hardware supply chain constraints continuing for several years.
“So they’re thinking, OK, if memory tiering can now be a part of my architecture, I can order future hardware differently and think about how I can use that differently,” said Moats. “That helps them just have other paths for navigating the constraints.”
Those who leverage VCF, not just for its memory tiering technology, but its end-to-end private cloud platform capabilities, are witnessing huge benefits compared to the public cloud and on-premise competitors.
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“Some of the largest banks in the world are talking about [VCF] as part of their long-term strategy for dealing with this,” Moats said. “And it’s not just memory tiering.”
“The smaller customers that we have in commercial, they understand that our operations component can do a number of things that help them better understand utilization of compute today which maybe they haven’t optimized yet,” he said. “So they can basically go free up additional existing resource they didn’t know they could.”
VMware Sales Growth And Partner Push In 2026
Broadcom’s infrastructure software group—which includes VMware—generated $8.75 billion in revenue during the company’s third fiscal quarter of 2026.
This represents a 29 percent growth rate year over year for Broadcom’s VMware software group.
Moats is senior vice president of global commercial sales and partners, with responsibilities including driving partner-centric revenue growth, enhancing partner implementation and delivery capabilities, as well as strengthening strategic partnerships.
Moats has decades of experience in channel partner sales and go-to-market, including the past eight years at Broadcom in roles such as vice president of sales for global system integrators.
“There is significant expansion opportunity all around us,” he said. “So we really need these partners thinking about how they help customers look at all the options and make it clear what VCF or VVF [VMware vSphere Foundation] can do for them. “
In an interview with CRN, Moats explains VCF, how VMware’s customers pricing concerns fade away when they realize the full platform value, as well as his message to channel partners.
Are pricing concerns winding down now as time has passed for customers to assess their VMware investment?
Yeah, I believe so. I just had a meeting with a partner who said when they talk to customers they said, “This can be the most expensive piece of software you’ve ever owned, or the cheapest piece of software you’ve ever owned. It’s all about what you want to do with it.”
The partner’s job is to make a really simple translation of what you can go do to take cost out and stop paying for extra third-party tools.
So if you’re running a workload on Azure or GCP, that workload could very easily be brought to the infrastructure you’ve already invested in and is running for no incremental cost on premise. So ultimately, you’ll stop paying for those variable fees over time.
There are also several operational tool categories or security tool categories that they may be using today, but if they turn on these features, they no longer have to continue paying these third-party costs.
So helping customers just see the paths and do the TCO is the key. And then the customer can pull the levers.
But if they just continue to run only the hypervisor, they may not see all the value.
So the value realization is there. We just need to do a better job of showing the customers the path.
Talk about VCF’s leverage versus public cloud and others when it comes to the supply chain and memory cost issues?
It’s not just our memory tiering technology that helps.
The theme is how do I stretch my current assets? How do I stretch my infrastructure? That’s part of it.
This isn’t just a short-term thing—we think this is going to go on for a number of years.
So they’re thinking, “OK, if memory tiering can now be a part of my architecture, I can order future hardware differently and think about how I can use that differently.”
That helps them just have other paths for navigating the constraints.
Obviously most of our reseller partners and our services partners are big hardware suppliers. And they consult around this.
What memory tiering does is allows these partners to have planning conversations with more options.
They can explain, “Here’s how you should think of memory tiering, and how you can actually decide what you’re buying, and have some flexibility to the delivery of it and the constraints you can’t control.” It just gives them more tools in their arsenal to deal with the issue, quite frankly.
What benefits are customers seeing from VCF’s memory tiering capabilities?
Not everybody is going to necessarily right away go into memory tiering. But those who are robust, and plan it with a partner, see significant benefits.
Some of the largest banks in the world are talking about this as part of their long-term strategy for dealing with this. I don’t think people think [supply chain constraints] is a very short-term thing anymore.
And it’s not just memory tiering.
The smaller customers that we have in commercial, they understand that our operations component can do a number of things that help them better understand utilization of compute today which maybe they haven’t optimized yet.
So they can basically go free up additional existing resource they didn’t know they could.
That’s almost like the first thing we do out of the gate for someone who does a renewal is help them figure out how they can free up additional compute at least to be able to turn on some of the other components of VCF where they need some hardware.
Why is VCF the best cloud platform in the market when it comes to AI security?
Bolt-on security is inherently challenging in this new landscape.
All the traffic comes through the hypervisor, through ESX. Security is fundamentally built into the infrastructure layer, in the way we do things, and that is very different than, “How can I bolt on additional tools? How can I call external services to validate things?”
It’s just inherently different when it’s built into the infrastructure layer.
So partners clearly see the opportunity here now with VCF versus others.
The [Anthropic Claude] Mythos scare is causing customers to think about patching and completely new operating models on the frequency and the short time durations to get to latest state software across—not just infrastructure—but those who do custom app development are thinking about the source code that’s in their bill of materials. And “How do I verify that that source code is clean? Who’s backstopping me here?”
That’s something that’s newer for us and a big focus of our customers and the channel now.
As VMware by Broadcom’s channel chief, what’s your message to the channel?
There is significant expansion opportunity all around us.
That means expansion, grabbing new workloads to VMware—whether they’re brand-new modern workloads and Kubernetes, or workloads that have been around for a while that are sitting in public cloud—it makes a lot more economic sense on private cloud.
Or with what’s happening with AI and the architectures that will be required, modernizing certain apps or parts of apps and moving them closer to AI on-prem—all of that is expansion.
So we really need these partners thinking about how they help customers look at all the options and make it clear what VCF or VVF [VMware vSphere Foundation] can do for them.
Then, vDefend and Avi Load Balancer have significantly more demand and relevance today than a year ago.
There’s a very real expectation and a bunch of enablement and support and services dollars to go help customers understand how to make use of those.
