back to article Broadcom has brought VMware down to earth and that’s welcome

I’ve attended VMware’s annual conference every year since 2007 and this year the event had a very different flavor. The theme of all the conferences never varied much from “we’ve tamed the datacenter and have plans to make it even more manageable,” usually delivered in a two-hour keynote that sometimes featured VMware execs …

  1. sanmigueelbeer
    Coat

    Whether there’s more pain will depend on whether VMware’s landing is soft or hard.

    The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      That only matters when they hit bottom, and Broadware is no-where near there yet.

      I think that the reason the event was not-so-well attended is that most organisations have spent 2x to 4x their previous spend on maintenance contract renewals alone, leaving a negative amount to spend on travel and conferences.

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "unsure if Broadcom is a software company that will innovate, or a bunch of bankers.”

    Oh, I know the answer to that : Broadcom is a bunch of bankers.

    And they're banking wrong.

    But it will take diminishing quarterly results for them to find it out . . .

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: "unsure if Broadcom is a software company that will innovate, or a bunch of bankers.”

      My dear fellow, the collective noun is a wunch of bankers.

  3. Vulture@C64

    Lack of attendees is also quite possibly down to business ceasing to see VMware as a viable product to base their future on. Broadcom have reamed the heart out of VMware: support staff, R&D, gone. If it's not being developed - and Broadcom would have showcased lots of shiny new features that we want if they had them in the pipeline - it's not safe to depend on.

    VMware was always dependable, it was a safe bet, if you put VMware in as your platform you could be sure the support was there, the product development was there and in 5-8 years you were not going to get sacked for buying a dead duck.

    VMWare is now a dead duck. It'll be out of date in a few years, support is dependent on third parties which previously were running their own platforms, not supporting others. I don't think Broadcom realise exactly what they have done.

    1. StevieD

      au contraire, I think they know exactly what they're doing,

      They just don't GAF for anything that isn't extracting short term value from Vmware's tepid corpse

      1. Richard 12 Silver badge

        It seems unlikely that Broadcom will actually make a profit before impact.

        That's fairly typical of large mergers, as everyone involved in the decision making has short term incentives. They make bank within the first week (sellers), month (middlemen), six months or maybe a year (purchasing VPs).

        They couldn't care less if the whole room burns down two years later, they've already banked a ridiculously huge bonus and moved on.

  4. Jamtea

    Esxi and VMware are deader than dead. Access to licensing is missing on the portal, there is no way to access patches and ISOs properly. I was going to invest in VMware certification before the acquisition, I'm very glad I didn't waste the money now.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thank you...

    The VMWare community has been incredibly vocal about Broadcom for several years. The ship has sailed, the marriage has happened, the deal is done, and no amount of complaining will have it un-done. The path is for each to choose, but the steps only go forward, not backward.

    It is refreshing to see a reporter present an article that doesn't get wrapped up in the cult of negativity.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Thank you...

      Yes, and now that the numbers are out, the rest of the IT world knows what happens when a big company pisses off the vast majority of its customers. On a side note, try to convince me that GEICO will have only been a small VMware customer.

  6. Yorick Hunt Silver badge
    Trollface

    Brought it down to Earth?

    Well that's certainly a novel way of saying "run it into the ground."

    1. J. Cook Silver badge
      Trollface

      Re: Brought it down to Earth?

      And less fancy than "lithobraking".

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    2 Much Drama

    Agree, Broadcom has brought it down to earth. For years its been ran like an acquision sales org when the reality has been far from the truth. A lot of 'leadership' has made big bucks and careers for themselves running this scam. I welcome the trimming.

    The worst case scenario here is VMware becomes the new mainframe.

    It's still the goto and best solution out there for running private clouds and there's still innovation to be had in this space, Broadcom will invest in this to keep it competive.

    Good luck with OpenStack is what anyone with any industusty experience will say, it factually costs more to operate, managed solutions like Breqwatr have too few customers to be taken seriously in enterprise.

    As for Nutanix, the reality for enterprises is that ops is the biggest hurdle to change and which is why they are having a hard time taking advantage of the moment, only 11% meh.

    Once individuals have put their ego aside at cost increases, reality will set in soon.

    Those insisting to move on, Broadcom couldnt care as there's enough who will stay to make it worth it.

    1. jdb3

      Re: 2 Much Drama

      "Those insisting to move on, Broadcom couldnt care as there's enough who will stay to make it worth it."

      Well, that's the question, isn't it? Large corporations don't turn on a dime in 6 months. For my company, it was a rude shock to see our VMware licensing go up 3x from last year. Furthermore, we're still in the first year of the acquisition, which means that they're still "trimming the fat" (getting rid of valued employees) and "re-aligning ourselves towards the future" (looking to see what else they can buy). (No they haven't said exactly those terms, but it's easy to see them saying it.)

      Small to medium sized companies won't stick with VMWare, if there are any alternatives. "Fool me once" is the key here - they raised the pricing this much to provide less/poorer service, and no one ever hears of a corporation lowering pricing the next year unless they're practically going under. Does anyone know if they will keep the pricing the same/similar, or will there be another 100-200% increase next year?

      It's now up to inertia; what are the costs of moving to another product, how reliable will that product be, how painful a transition, how much staff is available to work on it - versus how much the pricing increases are blowing out budgets. If they increase again by that significant an amount, even larger businesses will be looking for another product.

      Finally, based on the article, will they keep "invest(ing) to keep it competitive"? It sounds like they released stuff that was already ready, and now they're looking around and thinking about what they have left to "innovate" on, because they won't be spending a significant fraction of that price increase on research. I fully expect we'll see several years of point releases, then there will be a major release that is not significantly different.

      1. Richard 12 Silver badge

        Re: 2 Much Drama

        Large price rises make customers look seriously at alternatives.

        That's always been the case.

        Virtualisation is one of the easiest things to transition, because the actual applications and end users cannot even see it - by definition.

        The only affected parties are the actual hardware (is what you've got supported by Nutanix etc?) and the IT support team.

        The x3 and higher multipliers mean a lot of customers will be better off elsewhere even if they have to hire a few more people.

        The RoI is relatively easy to calculate, and you know that whatever commercial platform/support you switch to is going to be bending over backwards for your custom and is getting a lot of experience in moving workloads away from VMware.

    2. sedregj Bronze badge
      Windows

      Re: 2 Much Drama

      (Feel free to decloak - posting as a/c is so unsanitary)

      "It's still the goto and best solution out there for running private clouds"

      No it isn't any more. I've got 20+ years experience with VMware ESXi and I remember GSX and ESX. I also have 25+ years with Linux, I'm all in on Proxmox. There are other options too involving Qemmu.

      Pick your mates with care.

  8. Groo The Wanderer

    It seems a lot of CEO's and CFOs must do some seriously hard drugs before presenting these keynotes; they're way beyond mere fantasy.

  9. Piro

    VMware exit plans

    The next three years will be filled with plans to move away from VMware, the world over.

    What a waste of a good product.

  10. hx

    The brought it down to earth and kept going

    VMware is dead and buried.

  11. Oneman2Many Bronze badge

    Reality is that the industry is moving away from Windows and Linux and moving to containers and nobody is using Tanzu. I actually see Broadcom buyout as a positive and a stick to get our developers to get off IaaS and onto CaaS. Of course that does mean squeezing 5 to 8 years development into 2 to 3 years.

    1. Morten Bjoernsvik

      And where do you think you are running those Kubernetes container hosts? On a bunch of esx servers.

      1. Oneman2Many Bronze badge

        Why would you use ESX for K8, there are plenty of mature bare metal alternatives.

    2. sedregj Bronze badge
      Gimp

      "Reality is that the industry is moving away from Windows and Linux and moving to containers"

      Containers boot something. It used to be Linux or *BSD but Windows has joined the party too.

      You seem to have forgotten a definite article and a clause. It might appear to be a bit of a faff but English does have some grammatical rules but thankfully they are largely optional. "The reality {insert whatever reality is affecting} is that ..."

      Anyway, I don't know anyone who can be bothered to afford the horrific cost of Tanzu. E+ and more on top for what is effectively open source stuff. It is quite literally daylight robbery. Not for me and I'm out. ... and so are my customers

      1. Oneman2Many Bronze badge

        Yes container hosting servers boot so OS but that something is not exposed to app and that is the key.

        And as I've said the same thing, nobody I know is using Tanzu.

  12. sedregj Bronze badge
    Windows

    Bye bye

    SSO is trivial to implement yet they didn't for years. To give you an idea how trivial, MeshCentral sprouted multiple SSO offerings within a few months and that is largely one French bloke doing nearly everything. My vCentre is behind a simple custom login page page on an Apache proxy with PrivacyIDEA and stuff. Why is it so hard to build that stuff in "natively" and just ... do the right thing out of the box? Its not rocket science.

    There are many more flaws, paper cuts, and wankery. I define wankery to occur when the developer of something thinks they know best and enforce their whims on me with no recourse. I'm happy to be subjected to safe defaults but no recourse for change ... nope: wankery.

    You cannot open port 123/udp on an ESXi so you can monitor its ntp daemon properly. Why? ... wankery. Hopefully you get my point as I see it.

    So I will trot off to pastures new. I've been flirting with Proxmox for the last year or so. I'm a 20+ year Linux sysadmin so that makes sense. I've nearly finished porting a customer to a hyperconverged (cluster of boxes with discs in them, no standalone SAN) and it is rather nice to have features thrown at you instead of being constrained by which license you have purchased.

    Veeam now supports Proxmox, as of 28 Aug 2024. Cool. However, do note that they do not support Open vSwitch yet. I'm still getting to grips with all this stuff. I'll probably remove a NIC or two from LACP trunks and use them for now until support for OVS is added to Veeam.

    1. Kicksec.io

      Re: Bye bye

      SSO was never implemented because VMWare is like any other large software vendor, acquire technology because it is cheaper than building it, gives a complete "check box" list of features dow a web page.

      The main problem with the growth through acquisition is that there is this think called acquisition cost, bringing the products into line with the rest of the software suite, sometimes (most of the time) it costs money to do things to centralize and after digesting a big acquisition keeping money in the bank is more appealing that designing things to integrate the stack better (like SSO), besides one of the fundamental cost savings that is made after any acquisition is reduction in development headcount.

      Can't develop new features when you get rid of your team and don't want to spend, I was looking at a product recently name is like "Big flix" owned by IBM and then someone else ...... in one screen we saw behind the 'kimono' - wow, my comment at the time was "Lipstick on a pig". VMWare has been no different for sometime, too big/fat to innovate.

  13. Dracula
    Megaphone

    Micro$oft is Here

    I wonder how much Micro$oft and Govs pumped into Broadcom to buy and destroy VMware... Azure is here for you, we need to see what data you have there. Time will tell ..

  14. sackofspuds

    I thought that was a professional, balanced article.

    Broadcom have an overarching strategy which is to invest in sticky products and concentrate on the tiny percentage of big spending, strategic customers.

    Broadcom will invest heavily in development, but only in fearures that its strategic customers want.

    Non-strategic customers will be outsourced to partners and are, essentially, along for the ride.

    Broadcom are very good at integrating acquisitions. They just get on with it, break some eggs and clean up later. They are happy to make some mistakes in exchange for speed of execution.

    As Hok Tan said at the keynote, Broadcom are serious business people. He meant that. He's not interested in being liked and, since Broadcom are one of the biggest companies in the world by market cap, nobody is going to get it to change strategy.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      As an almost-insider to the VMW-AVGO party bus, I'd completely agree with this comment.

      I'd be bold and add the controversial opinion that they are now charging closer to the true worth of the software. Sure, there are cheaper alternatives, but they're simply not as well baked and enterprise ready. Cost vs risk vs value vs cost-of-change vs etc. Uncle Hock is simply putting a more realistic value onto the software and pitching it to the strategic customers he wants to keep. He is clearly stating "take the full stack and we'll make it worth your while" to his target audience. As much as that is deeply unpalatable for many (inside and out), he's true to his word that he is a businessman. VMW will continue for many years to come, but the crazy discounts are over.

  15. TheBadja
    FAIL

    Broadcom continues the Computer Associates tradition

    Computer Associates were famous for their “Buy and burn” strategy. Ironic that Broadcom has bought CA and adopted CA’s business strategy.

  16. Adi Chiru

    Are you serious?!

    Broadcom, under current CEO is not worth considering a viable company to work with in any sense. VMware destruction is only their last epic fail. Why write an article that is not even half reality?!

    The title is ludicrous...

  17. L3375p34k3r
    Facepalm

    Broadcom Blurgh

    Man

    I thought we got away from them when we ditched Bluecoat/Symantec Proxies, only for them to buyout VMWare

    as others have posted, the support is garbage, always take days to get back to you with anything useful

    AVI Load Balncer were great, then they went a bit downhill with support after being bought by VMWare, now, its non existant, it was such a beatiful product when it first came out and they were independant

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