Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Jan 23 (Reuters) – Fidelity Investments said on Friday it had reached a settlement in a lawsuit accusing Broadcom Inc of threatening to cut off its access to software that has become central to the financial firm’s systems, risking outages and disrupted trading.
A Fidelity spokesman said the Boston-based asset manager voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit filed in a Massachusetts court in November after Broadcom agreed to continue providing services and software to its subsidiary.
“Broadcom’s services to Fidelity will continue uninterrupted and will have no impact on Fidelity’s business operations, customers, colleagues or business partners,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The deal was announced ahead of a hearing next week on a request from Fidelity Technology Group for an injunction to prevent Broadcom from ending its access to “business-critical” software.
Broadcom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the lawsuit, since 2005, Fidelity has used “virtualization” software sold by VMware to create, host and manage virtual servers on its physical servers. Over time, the software became central to Fidelity’s operations, the lawsuit says.
Fidelity said Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in 2023 and improved its product lineup by repackaging its virtualization products into an “expensive” portfolio.
Fidelity said that when it sought to renew the software, Broadcom refused to honor its rights under its contract with VMware and insisted that it purchase the bundle.
Fidelity, which has about 50 million customers and manages $17.5 trillion in assets, said that without access to the software, its platform would experience an outage and customers would not be able to access their accounts or execute transactions and its employees would be unable to access critical internal systems.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and David Gregorio)
