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By Hock Tan, Broadcom President & CEO

In the years that I have led Broadcom, I have found two things to be true for technology leaders: First, success with your customers starts with success with your ecosystem partners; and second, driving ecosystem growth is key to maintaining the growth of your own business.

This is why, at Broadcom, we bring innovation, investment and attention into our making customer value a lasting reality through our pioneering partner programs. These programs help us drive two pivotal customer objectives: innovation in technology and innovation in business models.

From joint innovation to accessing new markets, our pioneering partner programs help us do more for customers. As digital transformation accelerates, customers need fully integrated solutions that address their needs.

Today, we have more than 35,000 partners in our IT infrastructure and cybersecurity software ecosystem, and every single one plays a vital role in bringing value and success for our customers. We work with many kinds of partners across the entire value chain – including the production, procurement, distribution and deployment of our products. They help us expand the reach of our technology and drive better business efficiency and experiences for customers.

When we set out to make any business decision, we always ask ourselves the following three questions:

Does it drive a better outcome for the customer?Does it allow and enable profitability for a partner?Does it drive better efficiencies for Broadcom?

If the answer to any of these is “no”, it’s not a path worth pursuing. Our partners and customers should always benefit from the decisions we make.

What partners bring to Broadcom’s customers

At Broadcom, we understand that the key to growth isn’t found in being all things to all people, but instead we believe our customer-first mindset, coupled with purposeful partnerships, is key to delivering untapped value for customers. 

Broadcom’s innovative and industry-first partnership models provide that purposeful plan for how our partners integrate into the overall value chain, and empower each company to leverage their core competencies and do what they do best. Our highly capable partners help us provide solutions for customers ranging from the world’s largest public and private organizations to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Through Broadcom’s unique friction free Expert Advantage Partner Program, partners deliver high value services to customers of all sizes – including our largest enterprise accounts. 

Yet, the value our partners deliver goes far beyond services. Showcased on our Insights Marketplace at expert.broadcom.com, customers can find our partner-built applications that extend our product capabilities and tailor them for specific use cases – unlocking more value from our customers’ investments. In short, for every challenge, there’s a Broadcom partner ready to deliver the solution and support the specialized needs of businesses – regardless of size. 

What Broadcom brings to partners

At Broadcom, we are unique in how we engage with and support our partner ecosystem. Often, commercial vendors will attempt to control how their partners conduct business. But at Broadcom, we empower partners to identify and pursue their own commercial strategies, so they can bring sales and services to end-user customers on their own terms. We introduce industry-first, go-to-market partner models with shared risk and significant rewards. 

Our Global Cyber Security Aggregator Program (CSAP) is proof. CSAP was launched to expand our market reach and deliver enhanced levels of service to a subset of commercial enterprises with unique needs. The program brings together Broadcom’s Symantec cyber security solutions and partners’ resources along with their in-country expertise to offer a best-in-class customer experience. We have made significant investments, including in-sales training to ensure our distribution partners are well equipped to provide better customer support and a quicker response time to evolving threats.

Our customers can also receive hands-on technical help through our unique Broadcom Software Knights Program. We vet and provide certified partners with ongoing technical training, product presale and sales intelligence so that they can handle any complex issue put in front of them with hands-on technical support. We provide them with the best so that our customers experience the best.

Together, we have a shared goal and responsibility of addressing our customers’ needs and delivering superior outcomes. It’s a win-win-win. Our message to our customers, current partners and future partners is this: our goal is to deliver superior outcomes for customers of all sizes; and our partners’ success is our success. We understand the value our partner ecosystem brings to Broadcom and mutual customers, and we are committed to our partner and customers’ continued success.  

Learn more about Broadcom here.

About Hock Tan:

Broadcom Software

Hock Tan is Broadcom President, Chief Executive Officer and Director. He has held this position since March 2006. From September 2005 to January 2008, he served as chairman of the board of Integrated Device Technology. Prior to becoming chairman of IDT, Mr. Tan was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Integrated Circuit Systems from June 1999 to September 2005. Prior to ICS, Mr. Tan was Vice President of Finance with Commodore International from 1992 to 1994, and previously held senior management positions with PepsiCo and General Motors. Mr. Tan served as managing director of Pacven Investment, a venture capital fund in Singapore from 1988 to 1992, and served as managing director for Hume Industries in Malaysia from 1983 to 1988.

IT Leadership

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As companies lean into data-first modernization to deliver best-in-class experiences and drive innovation, protecting and managing data at scale become core challenges. Given the diversity of data and range of data-inspired use cases, it’s important to align with a robust partner ecosystem. This can help IT teams map the right set of services to unique workflows and to ensure that data is securely managed and accessible regardless of location.

Data volume has become a challenge for organizations as the size and velocity of data increase. Yet there’s no singular, one-size-fits-all framework for secure data storage and management. According to IDC, global data creation and replication will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% by 2025. This means that organizations need access to a range of solutions for storing sensitive data at scale, especially considering mounting regulations that vary by geography and industry. Two well-known examples: GDPR in Europe and HIPAA privacy rules for health information in the U.S.

With data well situated as the lifeblood of organizations and as a core competitive differentiator, data security becomes paramount. The rise in ransomware attacks and other cybersecurity breaches has raised awareness of the issue and made securing the IT estate a top C-suite priority. 

Upgrading IT and data security to reduce corporate risk was the No. 1 CEO priority for respondents to the IDG/Foundry “State of the CIO Study 2022” research, cited by a third of the respondents. Almost half (49%) called out increasing cybersecurity protections as the top business initiative driving IT investments this year, up from 34% in 2021. 

The push for elevated cybersecurity protections is also filtering down into storage and data management requirements. Gartner research shows that 60% of all enterprises will require storage products to have integrated ransomware defense and mitigation mechanisms by 2025, up from 10% in 2022.

As enterprises modernize with cloud, connectivity, and data, they are gravitating to technology-as-a-service models to refashion IT estates. Traditionally these IT ecosystems feature silos spread across multiple environments, including on-premises data centers and colocation facilities at the edge or across diverse cloud platforms. Compounding the complexity: the problem of multigenerational IT and the challenge of establishing resilience and cybersecurity across workloads. This considering the disparity of the environment and due to mounting cybersecurity, regulatory, and privacy challenges. 

Without an overall strategy for modernization, companies risk mismanaging their edge-to-cloud data efforts, either overprovisioning, which incurs unnecessary costs, or underprovisioning, which impedes their ability to fully deliver for customers or hit key business goals. They may also lack on-location staff expertise to design and manage robust cybersecurity protocols. 

“Customers want to be provided with integrated and optimized hardware and software platforms … to make sure there’s no disruption at all in the business,” says Valerie Da Fonseca, worldwide GreenLake and GTM senior director at HPE. “The key here is to shape the right data strategy, so you simplify data management and provide access controls in an as-a-service model.”

Partner Ecosystem at Work

A rich partner ecosystem is essential for delivering next-generation secure data management protection from edge to cloud. HPE GreenLake’s backup-and-recovery services help companies fulfill data protection service-level agreements (SLAs) without having to make upfront capital investments or take on overprovisioning risk. On-demand cloud backup and recovery services ensure resilience at scale and allow for an agile response to changing business needs. Preconfigured on-premises solutions provide extended options, and a rich ecosystem of third-party partners gives customers choice.

The HPE GreenLake data protection portfolio delivers next-generation data protection services, from design and implementation to delivery with no vendor lock-in. The life cycle starts with HPE’s Zerto ransomware protection and disaster recovery services and extends to hybrid cloud data protection with the HPE Backup and Recovery Service. Finally, HPE offers on-premises data protection with HPE StoreOnce, a modernized data management solution for hybrid cloud that simplifies operations and delivers data protection based on common SLAs. Additional backup-and-recovery options from ISV partners such as Veeam, Commvault, and Cohesity complete the picture, ensuring that HPE GreenLake for Data Protection Services provides a breadth of choice to make data backup-and-recovery operations seamless and automated.

“The partner ecosystem delivers a comprehensive, end-to-end suite of services that adds value to HPE’s data protection strategy,” Da Fonseca says. “We are integrating everything into our hardware and HPE GreenLake as-a-service platform, and the solutions can be located everywhere and anywhere and be fully managed if customers don’t have the staff.”

To ensure the right data management/protection mix, HPE works with customers to understand their business needs and IT management challenges, creating a holistic strategy that encompasses the right partners and operating model. That level of comprehensive planning is crucial to safeguarding data and ensuring an end-to-end data management strategy that truly mitigates risk and meets the needs of the business. At the same time, making data protection available as a service streamlines the customer experience, providing time-to-market and cost advantages.

For more information, visit https://www.hpe.com/us/en/solutions/edge-to-cloud.html

Data Management

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Cash pay premiums for some IT certifications rose as much as 57% in Q3 in the US, highlighting for employees the importance of keeping up to date on training, and for CIOs the cost of running the latest (or oldest) technologies.

On average, though, bonuses for non-certified skills were bigger and faster-growing than those for certifications.

One of the hottest IT qualifications was Okta Certified Professional, attracting an average pay premium of 11%, up 57.1% over the preceding six months, according to the latest edition of Foote Partners’ IT Skills & Certifications Pay Index.

The average pay premium paid for another qualification, Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT), rose 37.5%, also hitting 11% of base salary.

While bigger premiums were paid for a handful of other qualifications, those premiums grew more slowly. Certified Professional Scrum Product Owners attracted an average pay premium of 13%, up 18.2% since March.

An average premium of 12% was on offer for PMI Program Management Professional (PgMP), up 20%, and for GIAC Certified Forensics Analyst (GCFA), InfoSys Security Engineering Professional (ISSEP/CISSP), and Okta Certified Developer, all up 9.1% since Q1.

Other certifications attracting pay premiums of 10% or more included AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect, Google Cloud DevOps Engineer, Pegasystems Certified Lead System Architect, and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and a clutch of security-related qualifications such as AWS Certified Security – Specialty, Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK), CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP), GIAC Certified Incident Handler (GCIH), and Okta Certified Administrator.

No certification, no problem

Bigger premiums were on offer for non-certified technical skills, however.

The top-earning skills were big data analytics and Ethereum, with a pay premium of 20% of base salary, both up 5.3% in the previous six months.

Close behind and rising fast, though, were security auditing and bioinformatics, offering a pay premium of 19%, up 18.8% since March. Other non-certified skills attracting a pay premium of 19% included data engineering, the Zachman Framework, Azure Key Vault and site reliability engineering (SRE).

There were also a host of other non-certified technical skills attracting pay premiums of 17% or more, way above those offered for certifications, and many of them centered on management, methodologies and processes or broad technology categories rather than on particular tools. These included metadata design and development, quantitative analysis, regression analysis, continuous integration, data analytics, data strategy, identity and access management, machine learning, natural language processing, and more.

Security, as ever, made a strong showing, with big premiums paid for experience in cryptography, penetration testing, risk analytics and assessment, and security testing.

Other tools including Informatica, Keras, Splunk and Redis also made the list.

Why certification doesn’t (always) pay

Foote Partners offered a number of explanations for the decline in value of some certifications. Some are no longer relevant or have been superseded by more modern qualifications, while demand for others is quickly saturated by a glut of recently qualified candidates chasing additional pay.

Finally, Foote notes, there’s a hard-to-shake feeling among some employers that book learning, and test results don’t always translate to sufficient real-world expertise to do the job — although certification organizations are working to counter this with laboratory tests and peer reviews for some of the skills they certify.

Whatever the reason, some certifications have lost as much as 44% of their value over the last two years, the most devalued being Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate: BI Reporting, Avaya Certified Design Specialist, GIAC Reverse Engineering Malware (GREM) and SAS Certified Advanced Analytics Professional Using SAS 9.

Segments of volatility

Overall, Foote Partners identified 58 certifications that gained in market value and 67 that declined in Q3, showing a little more volatility than in the previous quarter.

When it came to non-certified skills, though, there seems to have been a significant shift, with 60 skills gaining in value and 113 declining; in the prior quarter, there were more gains than losses. The most volatile segment was for management, methodology and process skills, 40% of which changed in value in the quarter — most of them heading down. Despite this, average pay premiums for management, methodology and process skills rose 2.3% during the quarter, and 8% year-on-year, suggesting that one way to get higher pay is to pursue higher levels of abstraction.

Certifications, IT Skills

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As transformational IT has increasingly become a business imperative, implementation partners have been looking to strengthen their value proposition for their customers. To differentiate themselves from transactional service providers, the more proactive partners are evolving their offerings and approaches, thereby becoming more strategic than they had been in the past.

While IT leaders can maximize the opportunity arising out of this shift by leveraging the partners’ strategies and advanced capabilities, it’s important for them to maintain focus on the risks. Here’s a look at how implementation providers are evolving and how CIOs should approach partnering with them for mutual success.

Shifting to a transformation approach

There is a perceptible change in the way implementation partners are now approaching their clients as compared to earlier, and it is all about becoming a strategic partner for transformational change.

“A partner now enters an account with a broader area of engagement in mind. The discussions may be around a specific project with a CIO, such as implementing a typical solution like Oracle or SAP ERP, but the partner’s core agenda is to bring about an extensive and comprehensive transformation of the client’s IT infrastructure,” says Harnath Babu, CIO at KPMG.

“As the project progresses, the partner discusses the CIO’s pain points and what could alleviate them. This could invariably lead to the partner’s scope getting expanded into, but not limited to, managing emerging technologies, enhancing cost and operational efficiencies, bringing about automation, application development, or improving the system of records,” he says. “Implementation partners are clearly moving from the earlier point approach to a transformation approach.”

Sharing an example of this as it unfolded at KPMG, Babu says, “We engaged with a system integrator to help us with L1/L2 support. In a short time, we scaled it to L3. We found that we could also leverage the partner for managing our infrastructure. Next, we asked the partner to help us with POD development as it was a big challenge to find skilled resources,” says Babu. “So, what started as an L1/L2 service engagement, eventually led to infrastructure management and resource augmentation.”

The POD, or product oriented delivery, is a software development model that entails building small, self-sufficient cross-functional teams that take care of specific requirements or tasks for a project.

Takeaways for CIOs from this trend: Leveraging one partner instead of many frees up CIOs and their teams from more boilerplate deployments, allowing them to focus on what is core to the business. “An implementation partner looks at the total value generated from an account. Therefore, if a CIO gives value to the partner, the latter will reciprocate. This will give CIOs the confidence of having a strong partner behind them. There can then be a project director to manage the project on a day-to-day basis and the CIO can intervene only when there is budget or strategy involved,” says Babu.

 

Building Centers of Excellence 

With the aim of adding value to their customers, implementation partners are increasingly realizing the importance of building technological expertise.

“To keep pace with the market and stay relevant, implementation partners are building on human capital and expertise. For instance, most partners lacked competency in cloud as there wasn’t much requirement related to it in the past. However, as cloud is gaining a strong traction, they have also upped the ante,” says Subramanya C, global CTO at business process management company Sagility (formerly HGS Healthcare). 

So, when Subramanya decided to move the company’s SAP, SharePoint portal, intranet, and other applications to the cloud, he roped in a partner who had a Center of Excellence on cloud and 12 to 15 subject matter experts (SME) on the technology.

“Partners with such capabilities were not seen in the past,” he says. “More than 100 servers had to be migrated in a few weeks. Immense planning, resources, and mitigation of risk were involved in the project. However, the partner’s strong technical expertise, which formed the basis of the center of excellence, made sure that the project got completed smoothly and as per the scheduled plan,” says Subramanya.

Takeaways for CIOs from this trend: Although implementation partners can provide deeper expertise than they could in the past, IT leaders should not be complacent when enlisting it. “For complex projects, like ours, strong governance is required from the enterprise technology leader’s end,” Subramanya says. “IT leaders can outsource a task or an activity to a partner and their SME, but they can’t outsource their responsibilities. Therefore, we ensured a strong governance framework was in place while implementing this project. We also had our own SME working in close collaboration with the partner’s experts.”

 

Collaborating with other partners

The evolution of technology, driven by modernization of applications and services, is catalyzing collaboration among system integrators.

As Archie Jackson, head of special initiatives, IT, and security at digital transformation company Incedo says, “I have seen system integrators coming together to offer solutions, a trend that wasn’t visible in the past. Today, products don’t work in silos. One product has multiple linkages with other products, and it orchestrates and expands into other areas. For instance, a security solution today is not limited only to the network. It is connected to end point and applications, too. Therefore, one project could spill over to another. A partner, however, may not have the expertise or the bandwidth to execute everything, which leads to collaboration with other partners.”

Incedo was in talks with a partner some time back for implementing managed links for connectivity. The end-to-end managed service would have offered remote connectivity to access corporate network from anywhere in the world.

“During the conversations, the partner suggested he could bring another implementation partner to enhance the cybersecurity of the links. It came across as a logical fit because the links had to be secure, but I had not seen a partner collaborating with another one like this in the past,” says Jackson. Takeaways for CIOs from this trend: One implementation partner bringing another partner may help a CIO, but it could also increase the cost of the project. “This is a good option only if a CIO wants to build capability. The primary partner will build his margin into the project for which he is getting the second partner, thereby increasing the cost for the CIO.  If CIOs have the capacity to architect a solution more efficiently, they should do so in-house,” says Jackson.

IT Strategy

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By Hock Tan, President and Chief Executive Officer, Broadcom

I recently visited Washington, D.C. to meet with policymakers and government customers to talk about the future of cybersecurity. Broadcom Software solutions secure digital operations across the federal government, and our Global Intelligence Network (GIN) evaluates and shares insights on the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape with U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to ensure the safety and security of our critical infrastructure customers and the cyber ecosystem.

During my visit, I had the honor of meeting two superb public servants working to secure our global information technology infrastructure: National Cyber Director (NCD) Chris Inglis and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly. President Biden could not have selected two more talented and experienced leaders to work closely with the world’s leading IT security companies and IT-dependent government agencies that comprise our virtual and physical critical infrastructures.

JCDC Collaboration

It can’t be overstated: without public-private collaboration to secure our critical virtual and physical networks, economies and governments around the world would be at the mercy of bad actors. It’s in that commitment of collaboration to better protect critical infrastructures that I was proud to be nominated by the President of the United States to serve on the National Security and Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC), and why Broadcom Software was honored to accept Jen Easterly’s invitation to be one of the first private sector “alliance members” in CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC).

Formed in August 2021, the JCDC is an action-driven forum that brings together federal agencies and the private sector to strengthen the nation’s cyber defenses through better planning, preparation, and information sharing. The JCDC showed quickly it could make a difference:In February 2022, our threat hunters uncovered Daxin, a sophisticated malware being leveraged as an espionage tool. We discovered that Daxin was targeting foreign governments that were not our customers. Thanks to our engagements with CISA through the JCDC, we informed the CISA team of the threat, and they connected us with the appropriate officials from the targeted foreign governments. Together, we were able to detect the malware and remediate infected computer systems. Jen and the CISA team also issued a Current Activity alert that linked to a Broadcom-published blog, alerting other government and critical infrastructure networks about Daxin.  

The Future

Given the success of the JCDC, and Broadcom’s overall engagement with the federal government, you can imagine how thrilled and honored I was to meet Chris and Jen in person and talk about additional ways we can deepen an already creative, collaborative, and productive partnership.

As the NCD, Chris and his team are developing a national cyber strategy that they will be presenting to the President later this year. Chris has written that to better protect the cyber landscape, we will need to shift the burden away from individual end-users of IT products toward larger, better-resourced private and public organizations. Rather than leaving it to end-users to find and add security to the IT products and services they use on their own, Chris would like to see security developed and integrated into the overall IT infrastructure more holistically. We at Broadcom Software already have undertaken a number of initiatives designed to build-in security in the development, implementation, and maintenance of our products, ranging from supply chain hardening to Zero Day prevention and notification.  Not every vendor takes these types of proactive measures, which presents policymakers with important questions on whether it’s better to regulate or to incentivize this shift, or to use a combination of both. While there are no straightforward answers to these questions, Broadcom Software will continue to offer safe and secure products.

Chris and Jen also have been tremendous advocates to promote private and public initiatives to build a stronger cyber workforce.  And they are taking steps to do something about it.  The most important assets essential to the security of IT networks and law-abiding nations are the talented professionals who make cybersecurity their cause and calling. Yet, skilled IT workforce shortages require both expanding and upgrading our overall talent pipeline, as well as improving communications between and within governments and the private sector. Jen has been highlighting CISA’s Cyber Innovation Fellows initiative, where private sector employees can be “detailed” to CISA part-time for up to six months to better understand CISA and work to build stronger relationships between the public and private sector. Jen was inspired by a similar program run by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in the UK, which has been enormously successful.  And Chris recently hosted the National Cyber Workforce and Education Summit at the White House, which focused on building our nation’s cyber workforce by improving skills-based pathways to cyber jobs and educating Americans so that they have the necessary skills to thrive in our increasingly digital society.

While these are important initiatives, what resonated with me most in our meetings is the value of Broadcom’s partnerships with the public sector, and especially with leaders like Jen and Chris and their exceptional teams. Meeting them during my visit was an important milestone for Broadcom Software, but more meaningful to me and our team is the continued collaboration and positive impact we will have going forward to protect critical infrastructures across government and industry.

Hock Tan, President and Chief Executive Officer, Broadcom:

Broadcom Software

Hock Tan is Broadcom President, Chief Executive Officer and Director. He has held this position since March 2006. From September 2005 to January 2008, he served as chairman of the board of Integrated Device Technology. Prior to becoming chairman of IDT, Mr. Tan was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Integrated Circuit Systems from June 1999 to September 2005. Prior to ICS, Mr. Tan was Vice President of Finance with Commodore International from 1992 to 1994, and previously held senior management positions with PepsiCo and General Motors. Mr. Tan served as managing director of Pacven Investment, a venture capital fund in Singapore from 1988 to 1992, and served as managing director for Hume Industries in Malaysia from 1983 to 1988.

Data and Information Security, IT Leadership