VMware customers fear Broadcom acquisition will stall innovation, increase cost Analyst firms S&P Global Market Intelligence and Gartner have both offered negative evaluations of Broadcom's takeover of VMware. S&P surveyed VMware customers and found 44 percent feel neutral about the deal, and 40 percent expressed negative sentiments. But when the analyst crunched the numbers for current customers of both …
VMware's last quarterly profits were down over 40% year-to-year.
If anyone thinks Broadcom is going to tolerate that they haven't been watching Broadcom's history or the history of M&As.
License fees will go up and a big chunk of people will be found redundant and fired.
Same as it ever was.
A painfully detailed account. I was among those hoping for an anti-trust investigation, but as he mentions... hope is not a strategy and the situation would require an extremely motivated administration which might end up not having a strong enough argument anyways... Thanks for sharing
The very first thing that will happen is ESXi 8.0 will be released, and 7 relegated to minimum life support with as short an EOL as they can get away with. Doesn't matter if they have any new features ready for prime time, they'll just rebrand it to ensure anyone who tried to negotiate a long-term contract won't get away with it.
This happens disheartingly frequently in the business arena. Successful company is bought by large conglomerate and disappears entirely.
What is the point of buying a company if you are already intent on killing its star product ?
The Lido just folded in Paris. It was purchased three months ago by the Accord group. Don't tell me that they were not aware of financial issues at the time of purchase, so why did they follow through ? Because Accord wanted to shut down the Lido ? A world-known icon of Paris night life ?
Who makes those decisions ?
Broadcom's strategy appears to be to split their customer by size into 4 tiers, then basically only care about the top two tiers of "Very Large" and "Humongous" customers. These have huge estates which will take time to move to an alternate product. In the VMWare case this is estimated to be about 600 companies globally.
Broadcom will soak these with price increases knowing that they can't move anywhere else anytime soon. If the smaller customers walk they don't really care as the bulk of the revenue comes from the big players. This is how they will cash in while slashing headcount and R&D.
We are (more or less) a VMware shop, although we run windows VMs for ~80% of our application load.
I've seen what MS wants for Hyper-V for licensing, and TBH, that (and the pain of translating VMs from ESX to Hyper-V) has kept us on VMWare.
I think the only rational product out there that's not Xen (Or whatever Citrix calls it's Xen offering this week) and Hyper-V is ProxMox. The fun part would be finding someone in the US locally that's willing to support it and work within [RedactedCo]'s... unique restrictions.
The one good thing is that we have time to look around- the deal isn't expected to be finalized until November at the earliest, and even if on Day 1 after finalization they crank up the prices and go Full Evil on it, we'll be (more or less) OK for a year to get our waterfowl co-linear.
Customer sentiment is that before the acquisition, VMware are difficult to work with, understaffed, and somewhat "haughty". "You will have to wait for us to delivery, we are VMware and you should be glad we are even letting you buy our Services."
Not sure if BM will want to increase the headcount, but they might.
Fairly sure the awful services VMware provide will get worse but as the big cheese said - leverage the partners while we focus on pricing, ....upwards
Good luck VMware colleagues
https://www.thelayoff.com/vmware
Show my a software company on Earth that delivers when its customers say, and not when the company believes it is ready to ship.
That way lies cost cuttings, short cuts and atrocious quality control.
No I am not including contractors and service companies in this - their job is to deliver when the customer says. I'm talking about regular software companies making their own stuiff to sell on the open market.
Sure, some may rush releases to meet some arbitrary release cadence, but even then they still believe it is ready for release. Even if it objectively isn't ready, those companies still release on their own terms.
VMware has that reputation because they have a distinct tendency to announce and hype up new features for everyone to salivate over as right around the corner... which might be vaporware for a year or three after that. Now that they have more competition it's only become worse, the classic FUD strategy of promise the moon to keep their eyes from straying.
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