‘Our private cloud enables collaboration among the [Department of Defense] and other U.S. government agencies on a platform that is robust, secure and easy to manage. There is no secure and affordable way to accomplish all of that with public cloud,’ says Broadcom CEO Hock Tan.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has made some bold remarks recently on social media and in public comments regarding why government agencies are picking VMware Cloud Foundation private cloud versus public cloud and on-premises competitors.
“Our sophistication in pooling and sharing resources and in automation has resulted in our approach having the lowest total cost of ownership compared to any other solution in public cloud or on-prem,” said Tan in a recent article supplied by Broadcom to The Economist.
Tan touted that Broadcom’s largest federal customer, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), uses VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud in its globally distributed cybersecurity training platform. He said VCF supports tens of thousands of users to prepare military cyber forces for digital warfare by replicating modern, complex cyberattacks.
“Our private cloud enables collaboration among the DoD and other U.S. government agencies on a platform that is robust, secure and easy to manage. There is no secure and affordable way to accomplish all of that with public cloud,” he said.
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Broadcom-VMware offers government agencies the ability to replicate public cloud benefits through its platform to enable a single platform that virtualizes their entire data infrastructure at a better cost and with enhanced security, according to the company.
This echoes what Prashanth Shenoy, Broadcom’s CMO and vice president of its VCF Division, told CRN earlier this year.
Regarding VCF’s total cost of ownership versus public cloud or on-premises architectures, Shenoy said Broadcom studies have shown “we are 40 percent better than native public cloud or three-tiered, hardware-defined data center architectures.”
“We’ve seen our customers get up to 560 percent ROI and nine-month payback for the investment,” he said. “So we are very, very focused on making sure this is highly cost-effective from a TCO perspective for our customers.”
Broadcom’s CEO Touts Internal Revenue Service Using VCF
Tan said the Internal Revenue Service is another big customer that uses the VCF private cloud platform.
“[VCF] supports the filing of tens of millions tax returns, combined with several of our advanced services like distributed firewall, Tanzu, Greenplum data services,” said Tan in a recent blog post. “The IRS’ IT team is able to streamline the delivery processing and protection of this critical service.”
Private cloud delivers services like private AI that can accelerate innovation in the U.S. government by unlocking software advances that offer more choices to adopt proprietary and open-source tools, frameworks and models, Tan said in a recent sponsored report by FedScoop.
“For example, in VMware, we’re working with an agency that’s using our VCF and AI capabilities to check for code drift as part of their security baseline testing,” Tan said.
“They’re finding better data integrity and accelerated adoption while keeping their data algorithms and models internal, which is far more secure,” Broadcom’s CEO said. “Today, multiple agencies have deployed our private AI solution because it allows them to bring the AI models out there to their data internally, letting them preserve data privacy and control.”
In a recent social media post, Hock made it clear that Broadcom-VMware is laser-focused right now on the federal government sector.
“As the U.S. federal government focuses on IT modernization, there is no question: The future is private cloud,” he said on LinkedIn last week.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Broadcom reported $14.9 billion in sales during its first quarter of 2025.
At of the end of the quarter, approximately 70 percent of the company’s largest 10,000 customers have adopted VCF, Tan said.
The $14.9 billion in revenue represents a 25 percent year-over-year increase compared with approximately $12 billion during first-quarter 2024.
Broadcom’s net income increased 315 percent to $5.5 billion in first-quarter 2025 compared with $1.3 billion in first-quarter 2024.
