Broadcom Picks Google Cloud To Host Core SaaS Offerings

‘The coverage and the performance that we have experienced with Google has been better than anything we‘ve experienced with any other provider,’ says Rob Greer, vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s network and information security software division.

Broadcom is moving its cloud-based security and enterprise operations software to Google Cloud and will leverage Google’s data cloud capabilities for its business-wide data and analytics strategy.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company, a semiconductor and infrastructure software supplier, is migrating its software-as-a-service offerings from its own on-premises servers and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We have chosen Google Cloud to be the backbone of our customer-facing services, as well as our own internal transformation,” said Rob Greer, vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s network and information security software division, in an interview with CRN. “The majority of our workloads were in our own data centers. Thanks to moving to Google, we don‘t need to worry about that level of technology, management and integration anymore. The majority of the value here is on customer-facing, 24-by-seven-by-365, global workloads that need to be available and performant for our customers, and most of those will be moved over this calendar year.”

Broadcom’s Symantec Web Security Service, Cloud SOC Cloud Access Security Broker and Cloud DLP Content Detection Service most recently have been migrated to Google Cloud.

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“It‘s been a joint partnership with Google for almost a year and a half now, and within six months, we were able to cut over one of the largest workloads that you’ll find any cybersecurity vendor moving to a public cloud provider,” Greer said. “The coverage and the performance that we have experienced with Google has been better than anything we’ve experienced with any other provider. Our customers have seen some significant value as well around performance and availability, serviceability, observability.”

Broadcom also has modernized its security stack and standardized service delivery processes and offerings on the Google Cloud infrastructure, according to the companies.

Cost was a “big driver” in the deal, according to Greer.

“The long-term relationship we have with Google allows us to plan more effectively and get efficiencies,” he said. “And so a lot of the tools that we‘ve been given by Google to manage our compute, storage and network…costs allow all of us as general managers to tune those operators and related services, so that we get the maximum benefit at the lowest cost.”

Google Cloud’s platform has extended Broadcom closer to the edge of where its customers, among the largest businesses and organizations in the world, sit globally, according to Greer.

A former hardware-focused technology company, Broadcom dove into enterprise software with its $18.9 billion deal to buy CA Technologies in 2018 and $10.7 billion deal to acquire Symantec’s enterprise business the following year. Broadcom’s solutions include data center networking and storage, enterprise, mainframe and cybersecurity software focused on automation, monitoring and security, smartphone components, telecoms and factory automation.

Google Cloud’s infrastructure will support Broadcom’s software applications across its entire portfolio, including operations, DevOps, NetOps, ValueOps and cybersecurity products, as well as payment security products.

“Using the Google Cloud infrastructure to create a SaaS platform for Broadcom, the areas which are critical to businesses of this kind are really availability and security, because for enterprise customers, these are really, really mission-critical products that Broadcom is offering,” said Debanjan Saha, vice president and general manager of data analytics at Google Cloud, in an interview with CRN. “And, in order to run them, you need an infrastructure which is equally reliable and secure.”

Broadcom has made a significant investment as it undergoes its own digital transformation and develops its enterprise-wide data and analytics strategy to make more informed business decisions, according to Saha.

“We have been in the data business for many years, even before cloud started,” said Saha, who previously ran managed database services at AWS as vice president and general manager of Amazon Aurora and Amazon Relational Database Service. “And from the data and analytics point of view, one of the reasons I ‘migrated’ to Google - and other customers are taking the same path - is that we have the best data and analytics portfolio in the cloud. Data is in our DNA, and what we have seen...because of the pandemic, the whole digital transformation for various different enterprises has accelerated. Without data and analytics, it’s very difficult to run modern businesses these days.”

Broadcom is tapping into fully managed Google Cloud products including Cloud SQL, a database service that helps customers set up, maintain, manage and administer relational databases on Google Cloud Platform (GCP); Cloud Bigtable, a NoSQL Big Data database service; and Dataproc, a service for running Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Presto and more than 30 open-source tools and frameworks.

“Broadcom has a huge...data infrastructure with Hadoop and Spark in their on-prem environment,” Saha said. “They are transitioning those into Google’s managed services like Dataproc. They are also moving their databases, which are currently on prem, into Google’s both relational and non-relational databases, for example, Cloud SQL and Bigtable. So their whole internal data infrastructure and analytics that run on top of that are moving to Google Cloud.”

Both Broadcom’s and Google Cloud’s channel partners stand to benefit from the partnership, according to the companies.

“The channel partners benefit from the fact that they know that our technologies work well in the Google compute infrastructure, and Google is a big player with most of our channel partners’ customers,” Greer said. “The reliability and performance and coverage of our services is much stronger as they engage and partner with us and with our customers. Many of them have already seen improvements because of our coverage model and just the fact we’re closer to the customers and users as they engage with their digital workloads.”

Joint customers can use Broadcom and Google products together, “and we can take this jointly to our partners and our sales channels,” Saha said.

“We are working through some of those details -- joint co-sell and co-marketing that we can do with Broadcom and the rich portfolio of software products they‘re going to run on Google Cloud,” he said.