Presenting the Broadcom impact to your board.

Sometime in the next twelve months, most enterprise CIOs running material VMware estates will need to present the Broadcom situation to their board. The financial exposure is material enough, the strategic implications wide enough, and the press coverage prominent enough that boards expect a structured briefing — and frequently demand one before the CIO gets the chance to volunteer it. The problem is that most CIOs default to a procurement framing that under-prepares the board for what comes next.

This article gives a board-presentation template that has held up across the conversations we have observed in 2025 and 2026. It is built around the questions boards actually ask, the financial framing that survives CFO scrutiny, and the decision points where the CIO needs explicit board sign-off rather than informational presence. It is opinionated about what to put on each slide because the wrong framing produces bad questions and worse decisions.

The question the board is actually asking

Before structuring the slides, it helps to understand what the board is asking when they ask about Broadcom. They are rarely asking for an audit of the VMware estate. They are asking three connected questions: how exposed are we, what are we doing about it, and what could go badly wrong that we need to authorise spend or strategic decisions to prevent.

The CIO who answers those three questions cleanly will be effective in the room. The CIO who walks the board through an inventory of VMware products, licence types, and renewal dates will lose the board's attention by slide five and produce decision paralysis by slide ten. The board does not need product-level fluency; they need a clear picture of exposure, response, and decision points.

Slide 1: The headline number

The first slide should put a single financial number in front of the board: the total exposure the organisation faces from Broadcom over the next three years, including renewal price increases, potential audit settlements, and migration or alternative-platform costs.

This number is uncomfortable. It is typically large. It is also a number the board needs to see early, because it sets the scale of the conversation. If the headline number is $25M over three years, the board does not need to hear about minor tactical decisions; they need to authorise strategic ones. If the number is $3M, the board needs different framing. Establishing scale on slide one prevents the conversation from getting lost in tactical detail.

The number should be expressed as a range — for example, "$18M to $32M over FY2026–FY2028" — with a clear breakdown of what is in the range and what would move the number to either end of it. This honesty about uncertainty builds credibility for the rest of the presentation.

Slide 2: What changed

The board needs to understand why this is a conversation now, when it was not a conversation eighteen months ago. This is the slide that explains the Broadcom acquisition, the SKU consolidation, the shift to subscription, the audit programme intensification, and the customer experience changes that have followed.

Keep this slide short. Boards do not need a history of Broadcom's M&A strategy. They need to understand that the pricing structure, contract structure, and audit posture all changed materially with the acquisition, and the existing IT budget assumptions no longer reflect the commercial reality. Three or four bullet points are enough.

Slide 3: Where we sit today

This slide describes the organisation's current Broadcom exposure: the VMware estate, the Symantec estate where relevant, the CA Technologies estate where relevant, and the contractual position on each. The slide should focus on commercial exposure, not on technical inventory.

The numbers that matter on this slide are the annualised spend by product family, the renewal calendar (especially the largest renewals coming in the next twelve to eighteen months), and the audit status (whether the organisation has been audited recently, is under audit now, or has signals of an imminent audit). Resist the temptation to put a VMware product list on this slide; product-level detail belongs in an appendix.

Slide 4: The three scenarios

The most effective slide in a Broadcom board presentation we have seen is a three-scenario comparison. The scenarios are typically: maintain status quo, optimise within Broadcom, and partial migration. Each scenario gets a three-year financial profile, a risk profile, and an executability assessment.

The scenarios should be honest. The status quo scenario is usually the most expensive over three years but the most executable. The optimise scenario reduces cost but requires negotiation execution risk. The partial migration scenario reduces cost more but introduces operational and execution risk. Putting these honestly side by side gives the board the framework to direct the strategy without micromanaging the tactics.

Slide 5: The audit risk

Boards in 2026 are aware that Broadcom audits are happening and that the financial stakes are material. This slide addresses audit risk directly: the likelihood of audit based on current signals, the potential exposure if audited, the defence posture the organisation has or is building, and the actions being taken to manage the risk.

The framing that works for this slide is to treat audit risk as a commercial risk to be managed, not as a compliance failure to be feared. The board can absorb the language of "$8M to $14M defensible exposure, expected settlement $2M to $4M with effective defence, $7M to $10M without effective defence". That framing prompts the board to authorise the defence investment that produces the better outcome.

Slide 6: The renewal strategy

Most organisations have a major Broadcom renewal in the next eighteen months. This slide describes the renewal strategy: when the renewal happens, what is being asked of Broadcom, what concessions the organisation is prepared to make, and what the walk-away position is.

The walk-away position is the part the board needs to understand. A negotiation without a credible walk-away position is not a negotiation; it is an acceptance. The slide should be honest about what the organisation is genuinely prepared to do — migrate workloads, terminate non-critical products, reduce scope — and what would actually be hard.

Slide 7: The migration optionality

Even organisations that have no plan to migrate off VMware need a migration option as a commercial lever. This slide describes the option: what is the credible alternative architecture, what would it cost to migrate, how long would it take, and what is the organisation doing today to keep the option real.

The option-building work matters more than the migration itself. Most organisations will not migrate the bulk of their VMware estate in the next three years. But the option to migrate — credible to Broadcom, defensible to the board — changes the commercial dynamic of every Broadcom conversation.

Slide 8: The investment ask

The board presentation should end with a clear ask. The ask is typically a combination of audit defence investment, renewal negotiation support, migration-readiness investment, and ongoing vendor management capability.

The ask should be a specific number, a specific scope, and a specific expected outcome. "We are asking for $850,000 in defence and advisory investment in FY2026 to manage an exposure profile of $18M–$32M, with an expected reduction of $6M–$12M against the status quo scenario." A board can authorise that ask. A board cannot authorise a vague request to "do something about Broadcom".

What boards will push back on

Several themes recur in board pushback on Broadcom presentations, and the CIO who is prepared for them performs better in the room.

"Can we just renegotiate?" Boards often assume the answer is a renegotiation. The CIO needs to explain that Broadcom's commercial discipline post-acquisition is materially different — discounts are smaller, walk-aways are more credible from Broadcom's side, and renegotiation alone rarely closes the exposure gap.

"Why are we still on VMware?" Boards often ask why the organisation has not already migrated. The answer is that the migration cost is typically larger than the Broadcom premium for the next three years, and the execution risk is non-trivial. But this should be a costed, defended answer, not an instinctive one.

"What is the worst case?" Boards want to understand the tail risk. The CIO should be prepared with a clear worst case — typically a large audit settlement combined with an aggressive renewal — and the actions being taken to make that worst case less likely.

"Why are we hearing about this now?" Some boards push back on the timing of the conversation. The CIO needs to be prepared to explain that the Broadcom situation has evolved materially over the past 12–18 months and the board briefing is the appropriate response to that evolution, not a delay.

The decisions that need board sign-off

A well-structured board presentation surfaces three or four decisions that need explicit board sign-off, distinct from informational items the board is just receiving. The decisions that typically warrant board sign-off include the migration-readiness investment, the audit defence retainer arrangement, the renewal walk-away authorisation, and major architectural changes to the VMware estate.

The CIO who walks the board through these decisions explicitly — and gets explicit sign-off on each — has the authority to execute. The CIO who leaves the decisions implicit ends up either over-conservative (because no authorisation feels guaranteed) or over-exposed (because authorisations were assumed that the board did not actually give).

The appendix

The board presentation appendix should include the product-level inventory, the contractual position by product, the audit history, the migration-feasibility analysis by workload, and the negotiation history with Broadcom. This is reference material for the questions that come up in the room and the questions that come up afterward.

The appendix is not part of the main flow. The CIO who structures the main presentation around the appendix material loses the board. The CIO who keeps the main flow strategic and uses the appendix to answer specific questions retains the board's attention and gets the decisions made.

Common mistakes

Several recurring mistakes weaken Broadcom board presentations.

Too much VMware product detail. Boards do not need to learn vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and VCF as discrete products. They need to understand commercial exposure. Product detail belongs in the appendix.

Too little financial framing. A board presentation without clear three-year financial scenarios produces confused decisions. The financial numbers are the spine of the briefing; everything else hangs off them.

Avoiding the audit conversation. Some CIOs avoid putting the audit risk in front of the board for fear of escalating concern. This consistently backfires; boards eventually discover the audit risk through other channels and react worse to having been kept in the dark than they would have to a clean, framed briefing.

No clear ask. A board presentation without a clear ask produces a board response of generalised concern but no authorising decisions. The CIO who ends with a clear ask gets the authority to act. The CIO who ends with general remarks gets follow-up questions that delay action.

Cadence beyond the first presentation

The first Broadcom board presentation is rarely the only one. The CIO who establishes a quarterly cadence — short briefings updating the board on renewal progress, audit status, migration readiness, and the headline financial number — produces better outcomes than the CIO who treats the first briefing as a one-time event.

The cadence keeps the board oriented, prevents surprises, and creates room to escalate when the situation shifts. It also positions the CIO as the credible owner of the relationship, which matters when the next investment ask comes around.

The bottom line

A Broadcom board presentation is one of the higher-stakes communications a CIO will give to the board in the 2025–2027 period. Done well, it produces aligned authority, clear decision-making, and durable support for the strategic work the situation requires. Done badly, it produces confused governance, delayed decisions, and pressure on the CIO to deliver outcomes without the authority to make the trade-offs the outcomes require.

The template in this article — eight strategic slides, an appendix for detail, clear financial framing, explicit decisions for sign-off — has held up across multiple board conversations we have observed. It is opinionated for a reason: the wrong framing produces the wrong decisions, and the cost of those wrong decisions in a Broadcom context is measured in millions. Get the framing right, and the board becomes an ally in producing the outcomes the CIO needs.