VMware drops the lowest tier of its partner program – except in Europe Broadcom’s VMware business unit has dropped the lowest tier of its channel program, a move one analyst told The Register will benefit its rivals. The virtualization pioneer currently operates a four-tier channel program spanning Pinnacle, Premier, Select, and Registered partners. On Sunday the business unit announced the …
VMware will give Registered partners 60 days’ notice before deauthorization and then “work proactively with affected customers to transition them to qualified partners in the new ecosystem, ensuring continuity and support throughout the change.”
If registered partners have been paying attention they'll have built up skills with competitive products and will be working proactively with their affected customers to transition them to those products from less arrogant vendors.
Then it costs you nothing to keep their service active.
I would also mention that it would do your reputation a world of good if you hadn't made that decision, but you don't give a damn about your reputation anyway, so I'll not waste any more words on that subject.
"Then it costs you nothing to keep their service active."
In modern management, unrealized profits are a cost.
Nowadays, the dividing line between profit and loss does not lie at 0, zero, but at the benchmark of your company, ie, market expectations and bonus targets.
It feels like you are trying to look at Broadcoms decisions and judge if they are fair or just.
Instead, you should be looking at Broadcoms decisions through the lens of $61 billion that it has to recover to justify it's acquisition.
They are two very different views and only one bares relevance to future actions and therefore planned responses.
"It feels like you are trying to look at Broadcoms decisions and judge if they are fair or just."
Neither nor. Fairness is irrelevant, and just means whatever we can argue is within the law.
I look at them and see how they compare to the cash flow needed to recoup that $61B + interest + large profit.
I here assume that Broadcom has valuated correctly the cash value of the switching costs of all of VMware's customers.
What I do worry is that $61B is a lot of money and it might not be possible to extort that fast enough before the "partners" start to crumble, eg, due to a recession.
“The vast majority of these [Registered] partners are inactive and lack the capabilities to support customers through VMware’s evolving private cloud journey. That’s why the Registered tier is being retired to ensure every active partner meets a higher standard of technical, sales, and service readiness.”
"Customers will be better supported by partners who can guide them toward this modern private cloud model.”
Classical biology. Any symbiosis tends to turn into Parasitism when environmental stress increases enough.
Or when one partner is taken over by a parasite.
Broadcom took over VMware and is sucking it dry, including everything in its ecosystem. Any VM "partner" not fleeing fast enough will be sucked dry too
And it is useless to argue with a leech or vampire, or their Head of Global Partner Programs, Marketing & Experience.[1]
[1] I assume Dracula would nowadays incorporate to consolidate their supply chain and Dracula Enterprises would hire a Head of Global Partner Programs, Marketing & Experience who would say the same.
The typo in the markup serendipitously looks like a mouth open aslant in disbelief at the sheer chutzpah with its long tongue lolling down; Or is it just a caricature of Moats?
(Or is it greek type that the subeditor a missed. [Just leant what a flong is.] ;)
When Broadcom first announced they were actively trying to drop less-profitable customers, I wondered how they could be so shortsighted. It's not like small customers (like me) cost them a lot; as long as my stuff keeps running and I have access to patches, I am happy.
Why would they be actively trying to push small customers into the arms of open source alternatives?
But now I wonder if they are playing a longer game than I realized. Maybe Broadcom realizes that as those alternatives get better, VMware's time inevitably is running out with the small and medium-sized customers, so it doesn't matter if they pay attention or not.
I think they are trying to be Oracle.
Hits as when you keep hitting your head against a brick wall.
This aggressive push will only alienate your customer base even more. Those that are left will (or should be) investigating how they can rid themselves of any payments to this company ASAP.
In the future, this will be used as a case study of how not to keep customers. It will surely go down alongside Gerald Ratner as the biggest own goal in business history.
Which is the lesser of two evils: To bend over and take it, it to leap into the unknown with a different service? Most companies that rely on tech are risk averse to the issues that they can see (odd phrasing because data security is all too often not seen), so they'll stick with what they know works until the shafting is so much that beancounters start raising concerns.
In every large corporate there are teams of IT folk’s designing and operating the organisations DCs. These folks live and breathe VMware. It’s all they know. They are mouthing platitudes to management layers above about ‘how terrible Broadcom is’. But in reality, they will aggressively fight any suggestion that the company moves away from VMware. They don’t care about the price increases. They just want to keep their jobs and keep doing things the way they have always done them.
If you want to get rid of VMware, then I increasingly think you need to get rid of this cohort of people as well. Maybe start searching through HR records looking for people who have a lot of VMware certs. These people will likely behind a lot of the blocking and obfuscation tactics that are employed to delay or avoid the move away from Broadcom products.
I also suspect Broadcom have worked this out, and are confident that their network of ‘inside agents’ will successfully mitigate any move away from their tech….
Trouble is there is a relatively small pool of expertise using these products at largescale, so the way forward is a blended approach of retaining and helping those who don't wish to upgrade their skills to find new jobs, whilst taking on new hires, who can be developed into new enterprise experts.
Trouble is this is a very European way of thinking, rather than simply getting rid of people and then complaining about not being able to find sufficiently skilled people...
lots of earnest chat about moving away from vmware, but when its engrained from hosting, alerting, telemetry, automation, self provisioning etc across many thousands of physical servers all serving vital business functions, its not a simple case of spinning up a few new hosts & loading some alternative hypervisor.
also migrating live workloads from 1 hypervisor to another is not trivial especially when a gateway may be on nsx which you expect to ditch at some point.
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