Broadcom has signed a 10-year agreement with NTT DOCOMO to continuously advance the private cloud that underpins the Japanese carrier's digital services, the companies announced on October 19. The deal puts VMware Cloud Foundation at the core of DOCOMO's infrastructure for the next decade and marks Broadcom Japan's first 10-year comprehensive agreement covering licenses, technical assistance and maintenance support for VMware products.
The relationship is not new. Since 2019, VMware, now part of Broadcom, has worked with DOCOMO to build and operate its private cloud with Cloud Foundation at its center. Under the new agreement, the two companies will align their long-term technology roadmaps, combining DOCOMO's experience running large-scale infrastructure with Broadcom's technology and engineering resources to improve continuity, security and delivery speed.
Broadcom said the work will focus on three areas. The first is continuous service availability. Using Cloud Foundation, DOCOMO aims to upgrade and maintain systems without service interruptions, manage servers, storage and networking in a unified way, and expand capacity flexibly as services grow. Autonomous placement and scaling of resources based on usage is intended to keep service quality stable during traffic spikes, while VCF Forte Support, which offers Broadcom's highest-level service-level objectives, will help sustain operations.
The second focus is proactive security and resilience. To counter increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and emerging AI-driven threats, DOCOMO plans to strengthen rapid and continuous security measures using Cloud Foundation capabilities that enable timely patching, together with predictive anomaly detection. Continuous visibility across the whole system, combined with AIOps initiatives, is intended to support early detection of and rapid response to anomalies. Dedicated Support Account Managers and Technical Account Managers will also help DOCOMO incorporate the latest technologies and security measures quickly.
The third area is accelerated service delivery. By using VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service, the native Cloud Foundation Kubernetes runtime, DOCOMO will run virtual machines and containers on a common platform and use development and operations automation to streamline everything from environment provisioning to service delivery. Automating development, testing and release processes should let new services and features roll out in shorter cycles.
The products and support covered by the agreement include VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Avi Load Balancer, VMware vDefend and VMware Tanzu Platform, along with Support Account Manager, Technical Account Manager and VCF Forte Support services. Looking ahead, the companies said they will evolve DOCOMO's platform to bring together virtual machines, containers and AI, and to drive automation and AI-driven operations, in anticipation of shifts such as expanding AI use, new AI-driven threats, 6G and IOWN.
Hiroshi Ishimaru, general manager of DOCOMO's Service Design Department, said VMware products have long been used across a range of DOCOMO systems and that the long-term agreement will strengthen technical collaboration while maintaining reliable delivery of existing services. Paul Turner, chief product officer for Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation Division, said the platform will run virtual machines, containers and AI workloads on a common foundation, with the companies' engineering teams working closely together. For enterprise IT leaders, the deal is a notable long-term commitment to private cloud at carrier scale, at a time when many organizations are weighing public cloud, repatriation and AI infrastructure choices.