Broadcom cuts at least 2,800 VMware jobs following $69 billion acquisition

Broadcom introduced again in Could of 2022 that it would buy VMware for $61 billion and tackle a further $8 billion of the corporate’s debt, and on November 22 of 2023 Broadcom mentioned that it had completed the acquisition. And it seems like Broadcom’s first large transfer goes to be layoffs: in line with WARN notices filed with a number of states (catalogued here by Channel Futures), Broadcom might be shedding not less than 2,837 staff throughout a number of states, together with 1,267 at its Palo Alto campus in California.

As Channel Futures notes, the precise variety of layoffs could possibly be larger, since not all layoffs require WARN notices. We have contacted Broadcom for extra details about the whole variety of layoffs and the sorts of positions which are being affected and can replace if we obtain a response. VMware has round 38,300 staff worldwide.

The WARN notices listing the rationale for the layoffs as “financial,” however present no additional rationalization or justification.

Broadcom nonetheless makes most of its cash from its wired and wi-fi communication merchandise and different chips; 78 p.c of the roughly $8.9 billion that Broadcom made in Q3 of 2023 was from its “semiconductor options” phase. However Broadcom has been making an attempt to purchase its approach into enterprise software program for years now, together with an $18.9 billion acquisition of CA Technologies in 2018 and a $10.7 billion acquisition of Symantec in 2019.

Regardless of the layoffs, VMware will stay central to Broadcom’s enterprise software program technique. The corporate’s Broadcom Software program Group might be renamed VMware, and the corporate is reportedly planning to emphasise software program subscriptions fairly than one-time gross sales to spice up income. Except for that, we do not know many particulars about what a Broadcom-owned VMware will in the end seem like. The one VMware product talked about at any size in Broadcom CEO Hock Tan’s post in regards to the acquisition is VMware Cloud Foundation.

Previous to being owned by Broadcom, VMware had been a part of Dell, an organization higher recognized for its shopper and enterprise PCs, servers, and workstations. Dell offered off all of its shares of VMware in 2021, although Michael Dell himself remained the chairman of VMware’s board.