The VMware portfolio is evolving to support telcos in operating the infrastructure that runs some of the most demanding, mission-critical workloads. At Broadcom, our commitment to telcos remains, and we are now better positioned to apply the scale and breadth of our enterprise expertise to the telecommunications industry while meeting carrier-grade requirements.
The telecommunications industry continues to face mounting pressure to modernize networks and lower costs. Hardware costs are rising sharply, and global demand for memory driven by AI continues to create supply chain challenges, pushing server costs even higher. Agentic AI adds to the pressure, as operators need infrastructure to monetize AI workloads in addition to their network functions. The move to containerized, cloud-native architectures has created new operational silos, each with its own stack to manage.
Running these on separate platforms means investing in and managing separate infrastructure stacks at the moment hardware is most expensive. Telcos need a single platform that runs network functions, cloud-native workloads, and AI with carrier-grade reliability, so they can get more from the hardware they already own and scale as demand grows.
The next step is consolidating telco-grade capabilities and advanced enterprise features into a unified platform for telcos.
A Modernized Platform for Telcos
VMware software has served telcos from the start of network functions virtualization (NFV), helping the telecommunications industry transform and paving the way for the migration to software. We built a vast ecosystem of virtual network functions (VNFs) with choice at its heart, provided telco customers with a carrier-grade NFV platform, and supported them with openness and choice where they matter most.
Our investment in the telecommunications industry continues to deepen. Telcos operate some of the most demanding, mission-critical workloads in the world, and the infrastructure that underpins telco workloads must be engineered to telco-grade standards from the ground up.
We have been rethinking how to best support telcos. We want telcos to get the maximum value from the engineering effort that goes into supporting our more than hundreds of thousands of enterprise customers. Rather than continuing to develop Telco Cloud Platform as a standalone platform, we are now fully supporting telcos through VMware Cloud Foundation Telco (VCF Telco), which builds on the core capabilities of the cross-industry VMware Cloud Foundation.
As part of this, the standalone VMware Telco Cloud Platform licensing SKUs reach End of Availability (EOA) on November 2, 2026 and are fulfilled through the VCF license and SKU going forward. Customers purchasing the VCF SKU continue to receive existing Telco features as well as upcoming new features and enhancements under development for the telco segment. Many operators already run VCF for IT. Delivering telco on the same VCF platform lets them run virtual and cloud-native network functions, IT workloads, and AI on one stack with one operating model, rather than maintaining separate network and IT clouds.
Built Telco-Grade, Telco-Ready
VCF is engineered to telco-grade standards through its design, testing, security hardening, and performance tuning, so it is telco-ready out of the box. VCF Telco takes the strong capabilities of VCF that are trusted by enterprises and equips the platform with the features telcos need to deliver performant, secure, agile, and energy-efficient networks. Telcos are core to VCF, and they receive continued investment and extension with every release. We continue to expand our telco partner validations aligned with standard telco architectures.
The capabilities built into VCF Telco include:
- Carrier-grade reliability and resiliency engineered for always-on infrastructure, with high availability, fault tolerance, backup and restore, and disaster recovery, built on software-defined networking and software-defined storage to meet the stringent uptime requirements of telecom networks.
- Fleet management delivers operational simplicity with one management domain for IT and telco workloads from data center to edge, zero-touch lifecycle management that requires no onsite IT, and shared observability through VCF Operations and VCF Operations for logs.
- AI-native infrastructure with VMware Private AI Services built in, with support for fully air-gapped deployment for sovereign AI.
- AI-driven operations and orchestration exposing APIs that integrate with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, giving AI assistants access to operational data for smarter automation, faster troubleshooting, and proactive operations.
- Cloud-native and container-native support for running both VNFs and cloud-native network functions (CNFs) on consistent horizontal infrastructure, enabling telcos to modernize at their own pace with flexible 2-year Long-Term Support (LTS) with every minor release of Kubernetes.
- Multi-tenant isolation to meet business and compliance needs, keeping workloads from different tenants and domains securely separated.
- Energy efficiency and sustainability are built into the platform through memory tiering and resource optimization. Enhanced NVMe memory tiering eliminates hardware redundant array of independent disks (RAID) dependency and reduces server total cost of ownership (TCO). Next-generation compression with global deduplication reduces storage footprint, lowering TCO compared to external traditional storage arrays.
- Sovereign security and compliance, with in-jurisdiction operations, customer-controlled encryption keys, audit-grade evidence, automated policy enforcement aligned to standards such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the UK Telecommunications Security Act, quantum cryptography, and confidential computing. Zero-trust micro-segmentation is now optionally available with VMware vDefend.
What this means for existing Telco Cloud Platform customers
The future of the Telco Cloud brings network, IT, and AI workloads together on a single platform. By delivering these capabilities through VCF, telcos get a platform that scales from IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and 4G virtualized workloads to cloud-native 5G services to AI-native workloads. The work continues. The capabilities keep growing with every release, and the path to a simpler, more agile telco cloud is clearer than ever.
Next steps
- Existing customers: No immediate action is needed. Your current Telco Cloud Platform subscription remains fully supported, along with all of its components, through the transition to VCF Telco. At renewal, your Broadcom representative works with you to align your go-forward requirements to VCF.
- Existing VCF IT customers who would like to expand to VCF Telco: Your Broadcom account team can talk you through understanding the capabilities and options.
- New and prospective customers: Your Broadcom account team can talk you through new capabilities and detailed migration paths.
- Partners: Your Broadcom channel team can support you in understanding the capabilities that VCF Telco can bring to your telco customers.
For additional details, reach out to your Broadcom account team and sales representative.
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