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The vision of unrestricted cloud adoption, once heralded as the pinnacle of digital transformation, is now encountering significant obstacles. This shift is primarily driven by mounting geopolitical risks, increasingly stringent regulatory mandates, and the unavoidable realization that uncompromising data control is essential for sensitive workloads—a necessity amplified by the accelerating AI revolution.

European organizations, in particular, are demanding solutions that offer secure, resilient, and sovereign cloud alternatives. The challenge they face is that global hyperscalers often struggle to satisfy the comprehensive data, operational, and jurisdictional sovereignty requirements stipulated by European frameworks.

The regulatory landscape is clear: The European Union (EU) requires sovereign clouds delivered by in-country or EU-wide Service Providers.

A Strategic Leap Forward, Not a Retreat

The pathway to compliance and resilience is not a reversal to outdated legacy IT infrastructure. Instead, we believe it necessitates a decisive leap toward a modern, integrated cloud platform engineered to support private, hybrid, and public cloud environments cohesively.

At Broadcom, we are demonstrating a significant commitment to Europe’s digital autonomy through focused investment in our EU partner ecosystem. By collaborating closely with European Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), we are facilitating the construction of a powerful suite of sovereign cloud solutions, all powered by VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

VMware Cloud Foundation: The Cornerstone of Control

We know that VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is crucial to meeting the sovereignty mandate by providing:

• Ultimate Control: Customers retain the prerogative to keep critical workloads on-premises, thereby guaranteeing that data remains within national borders and fully under their organization’s control.
• Unbeatable Value: VCF delivers a robust sovereign cloud solution at highly competitive economic terms, making control both feasible and cost-effective.

VCF enables our European partners to effectively manage infrastructure, retain customer data control, support their clients’ digital futures, and maintain perfect alignment with evolving European regulatory frameworks.

Dual Routes to Market: Empowering the Ecosystem

Our approach is designed to enable the entire partner ecosystem to drive customer success:

• Cloud Service Providers (CSPs): We enable CSPs to offer sovereign cloud services based on VCF.
• Resellers and Professional Services Partners: Collaboration with EU Resellers is aimed at accelerating their ability to sell and deploy a modern, VCF-based private cloud for EU customers. As organizations plan the repatriation of workloads (bringing data back from public cloud), the VMware partner ecosystem simplifies this transition, providing the necessary tools to manage data retention, control, and sovereignty across any preferred IT environment.

VCF grants partners the necessary speed and agility of public clouds within a secure, on-premises environment. We can confidently say this modern private cloud platform delivers tangible results by:

• Enabling Innovation: Freeing application teams to concentrate on development of new AI and cloud-native applications rather than infrastructure management.
• Streamlining Complexity: Consolidating infrastructure to achieve operational efficiency.
• Unifying Strategy: Bridging organizational and technological barriers for seamless execution.

We are proud to support our partners as they offer a truly European private cloud alternative. This solution champions data control, regulatory compliance, and technological independence, ensuring the continent’s technology ecosystem is equipped to thrive. For our Professional Services Partners, we enable them to build and scale practices that drive VCF adoption and deliver maximum client value.

Broadcom’s Commitment

We remain dedicated to providing the flexibility, control, and innovation required to help European organizations grow, compete, and navigate a rapidly changing, data-driven landscape. This commitment is delivered through our focused and strengthened partner ecosystem, encompassing Cloud Service Providers, Resellers, and Professional Services Providers.

Watson Farley & Williams (“WFW”) advised Okeanis Eco Tankers Corp. (“Okeanis”) on its successful offering of about 3.2m new shares of common stock, raising approximately US$115m.

Proceeds from the offering will be used as partial consideration for the acquisition of two newbuild Suezmax vessels currently under construction at Daehan Shipbuilding Co. in the Republic of Korea.

The transaction attracted strong investor demand, and the shares were issued at price above net asset value. Following issuance and settlement, the new shares will be able to be traded on the New York and Oslo Stock Exchanges.

Okeanis is an international tanker company active in the crude oil shipping sectors. It owns, charters out and manages a fleet of modern tanker vessels.

The WFW New York Maritime team that advised Okeanis was led by Capital Markets Partner Steven Hollander, supported by Partners Filana Silberberg and Will Vogel, Counsel Todd Johnson, Senior Associates Ioanna Pantelaki and Haris Kazantzis, and Associate Lucie Couillard Sosa.

Steven commented: “We’re delighted to have advised Okeanis on a transaction that represents another significant milestone in its strategic plans. Issuing shares above net asset value reflects strong market confidence in the company’s outlook, and we look forward to continuing to support them going forward.”

Iraklis Sbarounis, Chief Financial Officer of Okeanis, stated: “We are grateful for WFW’s support in successfully concluding this important transaction. Steve and his team worked tirelessly and effectively, within a short timeframe, and were instrumental in getting this through the finish line.”