Broadcom to end VMware’s channel program, move partners to its own invite-only offering

Broadcom has told VMware partners the virtualization champion’s channel program will end in early 2024. News of the changes appears to have been shared with partners on December 21 or 22 and was reported shortly thereafter. The Register requested an interview to explore the change. Broadcom responded with a statement to the …

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Take over results in worse outcome for customers, shock

[J. Cook]

So... previously, it was a 'per socket' pricing. Let's half the pricing, but move to a 'per core' pricing, which would indicate that if you have a 2 core processor in a single socket, your pricing will remain the same. If you have, oh, a 16 core processor in a single socket, your pricing is going to go up by a factor of 8.

Did they hire someone from Oracle for their pricing scheme rework? /sarcasm

[Sandtitz]

Good or bad? Can't say.

The current licensing scheme has been per CPU license with up to 32 cores. So if you have a 36 core Intel Xeon, you need 2 licenses. Or if you had dual socket server with 8 core CPU's you would still have to pay for two licenses. So, when buying new VMware servers it's usually the CPU models with core count /32 producing an integer that somehow are the most attractive even if it's not the best fit.

Depending on the new licensing details this could be beneficial for some deployments:

HPE Microserver has a single 4-core Xeon. Good enough to run a couple VM's in a remote office.

Lower core count VMware clusters for Oracle DB usage due to Oracle's stupid (...or ingenious?) physical host licensing requirements.

AMD and Intel server CPU's with highest single thread performance (=raw GHz) have typically low core counts.

[Hans 1]

I would of have thought they believe the bullshit from some accenture trainée (excuse my French), and no, anything with a little experience does not work for that bunch.

[Notas Badoff]

Broadcom tells partners "Go fu*k yourself!"

Look's like they've musked up their buyout

[Bitsminer]

when is a channel not a channel?

When it is geographically bound.

I've been through that at $FORMERWORK when ESRI (geo-information software vendor) insisted very much on supporting their geography-based channel scheme. We system integrators had to buy their software in the destination country, often at inflated prices, and of course without support because, you know, the channel partners don't support outside their own country.

Or HP(E), which did the same on a large procurement (estimated $2M pa for several years). They lost that one.

I could name some others but IBM is too hard to spell.

If Broadcom fails to support their multi-/inter-/cross-national markets (VARs and system integrators and multinational corps) then they will lose marketshare bigtime and with Musk-like RUD.

[Rgen]

If you do not spend millions of dollars, Broadcom doesn’t care about you. They want you to leave. They only care the customers who are too big or too lazy to switch. Once all the small boys leave, they will have a massive layoff to save money. Dev and support.

Now that VMware is done. They are now looking for next target to do the same thing.

[hx]

I mean, they're not great, and I have no hope for vmware products and I hope they rot in hell for the change to a pay-more-for-less rental license scam, but at the end of the day Broadcom at least wants to sell the products they acquire. Much easier to deal with them than Micro Focus which was then bought by OpenText. OpenText is especially eggregious for renaming their products every year or two so nobody knows what anything is. I guess I want the Omnichannel Character Cell Display Experience Manager or whatever they're calling one of their ten different terminal emulators this week.

[Michael Wojcik]

The terminal-emulator products, along with the rest of the AMC division,¹ will be acquired by Rocket Software in 2024 (assuming regulatory approval etc, which seems likely). So at least the "OpenText renames products" issue will go away for those products.

How this will affect sales, marketing, licensing, and so on I have no idea. As a privately-held company Rocket's management are not slaves to quarterly results, though, which may help.

¹So COBOL, mainframe environment emulation, CORBA, mainframe application lifecycle management products, in addition to the terminal emulators. Essentially all the AMC development, support, and management staff are coming along.