How VMware-Broadcom Clients Can Move To VCF In ‘Gradual Steps’ Vs. ‘Brute Force:’ VCF Head Explains

“Even though VCF is a platform, we have architected VCF in such a way that customers can do steps to get there as opposed to just brute-force everything now,” Krish Prasad, VMware’s senior vice president and general manager of the VMware Cloud Foundation Division, tells CRN.

As Broadcom pushes all VMware customers toward VMware Cloud Foundation bundles, VCF’s global leader, Krish Prasad, says clients don’t have to immediately rip and replace their VMware environment but can take “gradual steps” to get to VCF.

In fact, he says VMware customers actually save money on the back end when moving to VCF.

“Even though VCF is a platform, we have architected VCF in such a way that customers can do steps to get there as opposed to just brute-force everything now,” said Prasad (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation Division. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, you have to deploy everything all at the same time,’” he said.

“Customers can say, ‘I first want to provide a developer experience that is nice and that developers would love.’ OK, take that as one step. Then you can come back and say, ‘I’m going to replace my storage with vSAN. Then next, I’m going to replace another vendor that is providing containers because I don’t need that anymore because VCF already includes container functionality,’” Prasad said.

Replacing other vendors’ products and technologies with the full-stack VCF private cloud platform can save customers money, he said.

“The customer can save money on this journey to VCF because they don’t need all this redundant, bespoke implementation that they had, but at the same time give a cloud-like experience to their developers,” said Prasad.

VMware customers must either move to VCF private cloud or buy a similar bundle like vSphere Foundation if they want to stay a VMware customer after Broadcom discontinued the ability for clients to buy VMware products individually such as vSAN, NSX and vSphere.

Prasad said it takes some customers “a couple of years” to completely transition to VCF.

“Moving to VCF can be taken in gradual steps. We’ll work with them at their own pace,” Prasad said. “The way it is architected is that you can take steps to get to the final destination.”

Hock Tan: Over 90 Percent Of vSphere Customers Purchased VCF

Last month, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said over 90 percent of VMware’s largest vSphere customers have purchased VCF.

“We see the top 10,000 [customers] as being people where it makes a lot of sense to derive a lot of value in deploying private clouds using VCF,” Tan said during Broadcom’s third- quarter 2025 earnings report in September. “We now are looking at whether the next 20,000 or 30,000 midsize companies see it the same way.”

For Broadcom’s recent third-quarter financial results, the company’s Infrastructure Software segment—which is mainly VMware—generated $6.8 billion in revenue. This represented a revenue increase of 17 percent year over year, above the company’s outlook of $6.7 billion.

Pellera Technologies Moving VMware Customers To VCF

VMware partner Pellera Technologies said many of its VMware by Broadcom clients are moving to VCF 9.0.

“The customers that are willing to understand the shift from current VMware deployment to VCF 9 allows us to go in and have conversations as to why it is more economical and why it is more beneficial for their entire enterprise,” said Perry Carfagna, executive vice president of enterprise systems and security at Pellera Technologies.

Carfagna said VCF’s platform security capabilities are a big driver for VCF adoption.

“Security is top of mind with everyone, all of our clients,” he said. “All of the users of VCF 9 have security [at] the forefront. So everything that they do in their day-to-day job—if it's provisioning or working with developers to ensure that they have containers set up correctly—security is a component of that entire composition of VCF 9.”

He said VCF provides customers with the “ability to manage one platform versus many products,” which gives them “a strong economic case as to why VCF should be the foundation of their private cloud.”

VMware Partner Training To Drive VCF Adoption

VMware is focused on enabling channel partners to drive VCF adoption and then ongoing VCF services.

“We are doing a lot of partner training. We have a whole host of trainings that we do for our own internal services organization; the same training now goes to the partners,” said Prasad.

“We have tons of customers going to VCF. We cannot scale to the number of customers we have,” he said. “So we cannot do it all internally with our own resources. We want to scale through partners. That’s our strategy. So we are really leaning in and giving partners the business.”

For partners taking the training, getting the certifications and driving customers to VCF, the margins and partner incentives are very lucrative, Prasad said.

Specifically, VMware will provide partners with financial incentive dollars for deploying as many VCF features as possible in a customer’s environment. There is also advisory and architecting incentives available for partners even before the implementation.

“There is a lot of that entitlement that is sitting there that partners can just take advantage of. Think of it as presold, where the services dollars are available for the partner just to go implement and take the dollars,” he said. “That’s a huge incentive. So that’s why partners are very excited.”

Prasad: ‘The World Has Moved On’ From Infrastructure ‘Ingredients’

Prasad said customers of all shapes and sizes no longer want to stitch together dozens of products from different vendors.

“The world has moved on from customers trying to cook up their own infrastructure with all the ingredients, ‘I'll buy this technology and that technology. I'll stitch it all together, and I know what I’m doing.’ Those things have ended up in a disaster and never delivered the TCO benefits of the operational efficiency that customers were expecting,” said Prasad.

“So customers now are saying, ‘Hey, don’t give me the ingredients. Give me a platform that I can deploy and get to a cloud as quickly as possible,’” he said. “ That’s what they’re expecting and that’s what we’re giving them with VCF.”