Broadcom has signed a ten-year agreement with Japanese telecom operator NTT DOCOMO to continue building the private cloud infrastructure that underpins the carrier’s digital services, as both companies look to bring virtual machines, containers and AI onto a single platform.

The deal is Broadcom’s first ten-year comprehensive agreement in Japan covering licences, technical assistance and maintenance support for its VMware products, including VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). It builds on a partnership between the two companies that began in 2019.

Agreement centres on uptime, security and delivery speed

With VCF at the core, the companies will focus their technical collaboration on three areas: keeping services running without interruption, strengthening security against AI-driven threats, and speeding up how new services are built and released.

On continuity, DOCOMO will use VCF’s unified management of servers, storage and networking to expand capacity without service interruptions, backed by Broadcom’s highest-tier VCF Forte Support service-level commitments. On security, the companies plan to combine timely patching with predictive anomaly detection, supported by dedicated account managers from Broadcom. On delivery speed, DOCOMO will use VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service to run virtual machines and containers on the same platform, automating development and testing to shorten release cycles.

“VMware products have long been used across a range of our systems, and through this long-term comprehensive agreement, we will further strengthen our technical collaboration with Broadcom,” said Hiroshi Ishimaru, general manager of the service design department at NTT DOCOMO.

Next step: bringing AI onto the same platform

Broadcom said it will next help DOCOMO evolve its infrastructure into what it calls a next-generation platform combining virtual machines, containers and AI workloads, as the telco prepares for future shifts including 6G and IOWN, NTT’s optical and wireless network concept.

“We are honoured to continue to partner with DOCOMO… this agreement takes that relationship further, reflecting our shared commitment to continuously enhancing DOCOMO’s service infrastructure over the long term,” said Paul Turner, chief product officer of the VMware Cloud Foundation division at Broadcom.