Broadcom’s latest VMware investments are giving channel partners a new reason to look beyond the pricing and licensing disruption that has defined much of the post-acquisition conversation.
At VMware Explore 2026, Broadcom positioned VMware Cloud Foundation as a platform for private AI, infrastructure modernization, security, and governance — areas that 11:11 Systems executives say could open the door to broader services engagements as customers move from experimenting with AI infrastructure to demanding measurable business outcomes.
VMware AI investments create new partner services opportunities
That positioning was evident throughout Broadcom’s product announcements and on-stage messaging, as the company shared more information about its roadmap for VMware technology two years after the acquisition.
Dante Orsini, chief revenue officer at 11:11 Systems, said the scale of Broadcom’s continued investment was one of his biggest takeaways from Explore.
“They’re continuing to invest in that middleware piece to provide more and more tooling to make it easier, so I don’t necessarily need to have an army of data scientists to get value,” Orsini said.
Private AI shifts the conversation toward customer outcomes
Broadcom’s VMware Private AI Cloud strategy is built around running AI workloads close to enterprise applications and data while giving organizations greater control over infrastructure, models, security, and governance.
That addresses a challenge 11:11 Systems is increasingly seeing among customers: enterprises understand AI’s potential but often struggle to identify how to deploy it against their own data and applications.
“Maybe last year or the year before you saw people that were spending a lot of money on the raw horsepower, but that’s not an AI strategy, right? I think people kind of figured that out. So they’re way more focused on the outcome,” Orsini said.
“Everybody knows about ChatGPT and Claude. You can go home and use Gemini. Everybody knows the difference it’s made in their lives personally,” added Justin Giardina, CTO at 11:11 Systems. “But a lot of times, when we speak to customers…so many of them are stuck because they know what it can do, but they get trapped into, ‘Well, how do I actually have this do something meaningful on my applications or data?’”
For service providers, that creates an opening to help customers start with smaller AI environments rather than immediately investing in extensive infrastructure or large internal AI teams.
Infrastructure flexibility could broaden modernization engagements
Giardina said VMware’s approach also gives partners flexibility to meet customers at different stages of cloud and infrastructure modernization.
“The fact that we can go in with the VMware technology and choose which is the best tool for what the customer needs is really huge,” Giardina said.
A customer that has already invested heavily in security, for example, does not need to replace that environment to adopt other portions of VCF. Another organization may want a provider to take over much more of its infrastructure.
Broadcom’s addition of model libraries, agent development tools, governed data access, and private AI infrastructure further gives partners a way to build AI services alongside existing customer environments.
Security emerges as another VMware services opportunity
Giardina also sees VMware’s security capabilities as an underappreciated part of the opportunity.
Broadcom expanded VMware vDefend at Explore with capabilities designed to identify AI infrastructure components and unauthorized AI activity, while AgentMinder is intended to govern how autonomous agents access enterprise resources.
Giardina contrasted that approach with what he described as the “very, very big spider web of utilities” many organizations currently use to secure infrastructure, including SIEM platforms, outsourced SOC services, and agents running on virtual machines.
“When a human needs to respond to a problem, the attack is already over and what was done was done,” Giardina said. “The fact that you can detect these kinds of things in real time and have the system take action…is something, in my opinion, that is super exciting that people should take note of.”
Partners now face the adoption test
For Giardina, the significance of Broadcom’s investment is that VMware is beginning to deliver on a hybrid-cloud vision that the industry has discussed for years but has often struggled to operationalize.
“This investment and this innovation that they’ve done has really created this cross-pollination, or multiple-cloud, hybrid-cloud world for infrastructure that we’ve been talking about forever,” Giardina said. “But it’s really here and works.”
That puts more responsibility on partners like 11:11 Systems to translate the expanded VCF platform into customer outcomes across infrastructure modernization, disaster recovery, security, and private AI.
For Orsini, the clearest measure of whether that opportunity materializes will come from what customers actually do with the technology over the next year.
“I hope that you’re going to see that the adoption is there on some of these additional services,” Orsini said. “I think the adoption stories you’re going to hear — I think that’s the most exciting part.”