Justin: There will likely be a major restructure and significant cuts. VMware has a lot of staff, and plenty of under-performing products in its portfolio that are badly in need of pruning.
Some of the savings will be returned to shareholders to buy support for bigger changes that will take time to pay off
Some will get sold off if a buyer can be found, others will just be ki-led. Some match the way Broadcom already groups things. The hardware parts should join the rest of Broadcom's hardware pieces. Storage will go to Enterprise Storage. The telco parts will likely end up under Wireless and Mobile Communications. The security pieces probably need to move under the Symantec banner. The maintenance phase enterprise software things will probably join the existing cash cow of similar software.
Some of the savings from cuts will be reinvested in R&D where Broadcom thinks the problems can be fixed. Cloud things, most likely. Tanzu needs help.
Some of the savings will be returned to shareholders to buy support for bigger changes that will take time to pay off.
Broadcom will make a bunch of mistakes because doing all of this well is really hard. It will do some other things successfully. It will be hard to tell which is which in advance.
Everyone who guesses right will proclaim their genius to the world. Those who made the wrong call will mostly pretend it didn't happen and no one will check.
Jane: You don't pay $61 billion for something to sc--w it up, so in general I think customers will continue to invest in VMware but might look to 'future-proof' themselves with alternative solutions, just in case. I haven't seen much discussion around the end-user computing (EUC) part of the business, it's all been very cloud-focused. So I wouldn't be surprised to see the EUC part of VMware spun off.
Keith: Broadcom will achieve its stated profitability goals. That's what they are experts in. On the way, we'll see layoffs in the 17K employee range.
You'll see products such as end user computing and security sold or spun out. Commercial (smaller customers) sales and support will go to partners, similar to how Dell and HPE handle these customers.
There will be even more marketing around cross-cloud with results coming a couple of years down the road.