Technology is critical in the semiconductor business

When it comes to productivity and competitive advantage, the technology behind the scenes is as important as the product out in the market. Broadcom Limited has a distributed semiconductor manufacturing business dispersed across the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Historically, the company maintained file servers in multiple locations. Without onsite staff, the upgrades, backups, and disaster-recovery services of this setup were time-consuming and costly. Plus, annual costs and capital expenditures had risen to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years as a result of increased usage and accumulation of file-storage servers. This made onboarding, vendor management, and project management more costly and time-consuming.

Broadcom Limited needed a cloud-based solution to address two particular needs: PC backup and collaborative file sharing. The organization also wanted a solution that would integrate with the tools it already used, including Google Workspace, Salesforce, and DocuSign.

Choosing an integrated IT ecosystem with a higher ROI

Broadcom Limited initially chose Box because of its enterprise security, auditing, and monitoring capabilities. The company’s IT team:

• Rolled out Box to 3,600 employees
• Migrated 18 million files from its product lifecycle management (PLM) system
• Eliminated all of its Windows-based servers

IT also built an external vendor portal on Box to onboard vendors in multiple locations and always share the most up-to-date contracts and information. Implementation was simple, and employees and IT were able to install, deploy, maintain, and use Box with minimal training. Box quickly became the standard to secure, access, and share files across the board.

But Box wasn’t just a good fit for practical reasons. It also aligned with Broadcom Limited’s IT philosophy. As Andy Nallappan, Vice President and CIO, puts it: "Box fits the '3S-3C' model: Simplicity, scalability, and security. Cloud-based, clean desks, and current."

33K users, easily scaled content systems, $10M in savings

In the semiconductor business, a content strategy has to be scalable, partly because divestitures, mergers, and acquisitions are so common. Broadcom Limited first put Box to the test when its acquisition of LSI closed in 2014 and it migrated 6,000 more employees to Box — making for a total of around 10,000 users at the time.

All accounts were online and ready to go the day the deal closed, proving that Box could scale quickly and easily with Broadcom Limited's growth, without incurring capital expenditures. Within two years of rolling out Box, Broadcom Limited had deployed Box to 80% of its employees and consultants worldwide. Through wall-to-wall deployment, the company realized a savings of $10 million in current and future IT costs over a five-year term.

That was not the last drastic scaling-up, however. The global infrastructure company that Broadcom Limited has grown into today is largely the product of an acquisition by Avago in 2016, which brought the total number of Box users/seats up to 33,000. The company uses Box as the underlying content layer behind all its business applications, and Broadcom Limited has also integrated Box as the content cloud behind its Oracle ERP solution, saving the company $100,000.

Box fits the '3S-3C' model: Simplicity, scalability, and security. Cloud-based, clean desks, and current.

Increased speed to market thanks to better visibility in the manufacturing process

On top of all of these huge cost savings, Broadcom Limited found additional returns on its investment, including happier and more productive employees. With content easily shareable with people both inside and outside the company, Broadcom’s team members found themselves able to:

• Access critical documents such as contracts and bills of material from any device, at any time
• Swap email attachments for secure shared links
• Gain 24/7 access to important files, notes, and approvals

The switch to Box ensured everyone was always working with the most up-to-date version of any file, whether sharing those files with external vendors or conducting R&D internally with other employees. Real work was done — and it was done quickly and efficiently.

Broadcom Limited now has one central repository for all of its content that integrates across its IT ecosystem, including Oracle and Google. IT also has improved disaster avoidance capabilities, with instant backup and unlimited version history of any file. Cutting costs was a major benefit of the switch to Box. But a best-of-breed tech stack with Box as the secure content layer has also amped up productivity. Now, Broadcom Limited can get semiconductors to market faster — a boost that ultimately benefits everyone.