Broadcom Isn’t in the Platform Wars
It’s Undermining Them and Attempting to Rewrite the Architecture
Everyone’s watching the platform wars from above. But Broadcom is tunneling underneath them.
While most eyes are on the high-stakes battle between ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Microsoft for workflow supremacy and AI-native platforms, Broadcom is playing a different game. It’s not positioning itself as the next great platform. It’s laying claim to something more foundational. Control. And in a hybrid platform world, where power isn’t concentrated at the top but distributed across interlocking layers, that’s a far more strategic move than it first appears.
This isn’t a company that’s trying to reinvent enterprise experiences. It’s a company that wants to own the substrate on which those experiences run. VMware. CA Technologies. Symantec. These weren’t flashy acquisitions. They’re anchor points in enterprise infrastructure. They represent decades of embedded logic, policy engines, monitoring frameworks, security endpoints, and virtualisation control. You don’t rip that stuff out. You run on it. Or around it. And increasingly, you pay for the privilege.
ServiceNow and Broadcom don’t compete on the surface. But they’re colliding beneath it. ServiceNow builds for cross-functional, AI-driven, and highly composable operational flow. Broadcom builds for enforcement, stability, and infrastructure performance at scale. One unlocks digital reinvention. The other quietly defines the parameters in which reinvention can even occur. That tension isn’t always visible. But it’s structural. And increasingly, it’s consequential.
In a HYPA landscape, where Hybrid Platform Architectures will become the reality for most large enterprises, there’s no such thing as a single system of truth. Platforms now operate in layered strata. Some sit above the organisation, shaping interaction and decision-making. Others sit below it, enforcing boundaries, provisioning environments, managing risk and infrastructure. ServiceNow is the former. Broadcom is the latter. But it’s the interplay between them that defines the enterprise operating model.
This is where Broadcom becomes more than a passive dependency. It becomes a constraint. VMware has given Broadcom a stronghold over the virtualisation and hybrid cloud layer. CA brought in the legacy automation, monitoring, and workload management foundations that underpin vast mainframe and distributed environments. Symantec adds control at the endpoint. With each acquisition, Broadcom enforces the same disciplined operating logic. Standardise, consolidate, extract margin, and secure lock-in. This isn’t about ecosystem expansion. It’s about architectural control.
That’s not to say Broadcom lacks vision. Its vision just doesn’t look like a PaaS or SaaS company. It doesn’t lead with developer tools or workflow configurators. It leads with critical dependencies. And that strategy didn’t start with Broadcom. It was inherited.
VMware and CA Technologies both mastered the art of architectural entrenchment long before the acquisitions. VMware didn’t dominate by dazzling CIOs. It embedded itself in the operational fabric of enterprise compute. CA Technologies built a business on invisible levers like schedulers, identity frameworks, mainframe monitoring, automation controllers. These weren’t tools you chose. They were tools you built around.
What Broadcom has done is take that logic and aggressively and unapologetically scale it. It doesn’t position itself as a partner in innovation. It positions itself as infrastructure you can’t avoid. It wins not by openness, but by inevitability. That’s not partnership. That’s architecture as leverage.
And that’s why this matters. Not just for CIOs, but for outsourcers, system integrators, and even the hyperscalers themselves or anyone building on top of someone else’s stack. This isn’t a clash of titans marking territory. It’s not market theatre. It’s a structural wake-up call. Because Broadcom’s architecture reaches into hybrid environments the cloud was supposed to liberate. It defines control structures that hyperscalers thought they owned. And in doing so, it limits not just what can run but how freely it can evolve. That is, your ability to innovate on your own terms narrows.
ServiceNow, to its credit, has built an extraordinary platform for enterprise reinvention. It has real claims to becoming the business OS. But even the best operating system depends on a BIOS. On firmware. On a base layer of enforcement and execution it doesn’t fully control. That’s where Broadcom sits. Unapologetically beneath the application layer. Beneath the agentic layer. Beneath the workflow layer. But never out of the picture.
In this light, Broadcom isn’t just an unconventional competitor. It may well be the silent gatekeeper. The one shaping the architecture beneath the platforms everyone else is betting on.
And in the world of HYPA, where success depends not just on composability but on coherence, that makes Broadcom a serious force. Not because it’s building the next big thing, but because it’s quietly becoming the thing everything else runs on.
That framing raises a broader implication that extends beyond ServiceNow and the PaaS contenders. If Broadcom is quietly becoming the thing everything else runs on, it puts the entire technology stack on notice. Red Hat faces the slow squeeze of diminished relevance. Hyperscalers confront a new kind of friction. But none are more directly in the crosshairs than ServiceNow. Because Broadcom doesn’t just constrain innovation, it increasingly competes with it.
That structural tension plays out not just beneath the stack, but within it. Broadcom doesn’t just control the substrate. It competes directly in the software layer. Clarity overlaps with ServiceNow’s portfolio and project management suite. CA’s aging service management tools still function in ITSM-lite territory which is sometimes just enough to hold space in organisations where modernisation is delayed, constrained, or deferred. In those environments, Broadcom isn’t just the gatekeeper. It’s the platform already in place. And that makes the threat multidimensional, operating both as constraint and competitor.
Through Linux, OpenShift, and Ansible, Red Hat has long positioned itself as the open foundation. But Broadcom’s stack isn’t built to be open. It’s built to enforce. Virtualisation, endpoint security, automation, and monitoring all increasingly bound under one operating logic. Red Hat may still be more elegant. It may still be technically superior. But in an enterprise where Broadcom defines the boundaries, elegance is optional. Compliance is not.
And that’s the threat. Not that Broadcom builds better software, but that it creates the conditions where performance no longer matters. Where control outpaces capability. Where architectural dominance renders innovation irrelevant.
This isn’t far-fetched. When billion-dollar architectures are on the line, these scenarios matter.
IBM has been here before. Notes, Tivoli, and WebSphere were once unavoidable. Deeply embedded. Structurally essential. Until they weren’t. IBM didn’t fail because its tools broke. It lost because the frame shifted, and it couldn’t shift with it. Broadcom now holds that kind of power. Whether it cements its position or fades into architectural irrelevance will depend not on what it owns, but on how it lets others build.
In a HYPA world, where success comes from layering the right platforms with just enough interoperability to achieve coherence, Red Hat risks becoming a guest in a stack it once hosted. It may still be open. It may still be right. But if Broadcom controls the environment, the budget, and the risk appetite, openness becomes an overhead.
That’s the final provocation. Broadcom doesn’t need to win the platform war. It only needs to define the architecture in which the war is fought. And with a $700 billion valuation, billions in free cash, and decades of lock-in already embedded, Broadcom doesn’t need to outbuild the next platform. It just needs to make sure everything still runs through it.
I know I keep banging on about architecture. But I have to. Because we are living through a defining architectural inflection point in enterprise IT. Not a product wave. Not a branding cycle. A structural shift. One where power is reassembling. Not through user interfaces or AI demos, but deep in the stack, where choices about control, coherence, and composability are being made for us. If we don’t get the architecture right, we’ll be running billion-dollar businesses on foundations we didn’t choose and can’t change. This Broadcom moment is just the latest reminder. And it won’t be the last.