VMware reboots its partner program again – and it looks like smaller players are out VMware has advised partners its current channel program will end, and it seems that smaller players won’t be invited back. Australian IT service provider Interactive outlined the changes on Wednesday in a post that explained the changes with the following five points: Partner Reduction: The new program significantly reduces …
Predictable, reliable, just there and works for as long as needed. Unpredictable infrastructure means that the IT department cannot provide what is needed for the business to thrive.
Broadcom is demonstrating how it cannot be part of any business stack.
What will be next ? An exit fee once a business stops using Broadcom software ?
The basic idea is to follow the practices that have worked so well for Oracle and SAP: make leaving the platform too difficult and expensive to be contemplated. And if everyone else in your industry is using similar systems, there will be no need to fear the competition.
Broadcom is perfectly fine being part of your IT business as long as you've got enough dollar signs.
Broadcom doesn't care about you unless you are spending many $millions with them. If you aren't, they don't care if they throw you away.
The competition still is lacking so much of VMware's solution.
Yes, something else may fulfill your needs, but there are lots of use cases out there that VMware fits in nicely.
In case anybody missed the smoking gun in the article, this is ALL that Broadcom care about: "Broadcom points to growing VMware revenue as evidence its approach is working."
If you continue to use their products you will be continually squeezed for more - it's really that simple.
Shareholders might also note that short term increases in revenue seem to be the only thing Broadcom's management care about.
Having pissed off most of their customer base, they now seem to be attacking their routes to market, so they won't have a way to sell the product that no-one wants to buy.
A practice encouraged in turn by more favourable tax treatment of capital gains. Though, it should be noted, that bonuses are generally give as stock that cannot be sold for a couple of years. In theory, shareholders could intervene, but as these are mainly the same few investment companies, they're just as happy to see short term rises in the share price and hope not to be around if things start to turn pair-shaped. The rise of the investment monopsody a couple of decades ago essentially ended the whole idea of independent boards, and, through these, real scrutiny of company decisions.
Companies love to shut down smaller resellers citing that 80% of their revenue comes from 20% of their resellers. Doesn't take many iterations to reach a point where there's nobody left. Plus there's no opportunities for new resellers to join the party.
When I worked in Channel Sales for a software company, we used to deal with some ridiculously small resellers. Most disappeared, some didn't. It's just a case of dealing with them as efficiently as possible.
but also as small clients grow and staff move to larger companies and careers progress and staff move the introduce the reseller to new / larger customers
the company I work for one of our customers went bust (no fault of theirs) and 4 of the senior IT staff have now brought large new customers to us,
as they say from little acorns large oak trees grow
back in 2011 they tried changing the licensing model from per CPU to ram based
it lead to a mass move from VMware to Hyper-v, the sudden loss of revenue caused a rethink and rapid back pedal https://itassetmanagement.net/2012/08/26/vmware-vram/
seems broadcom are repeating history by playing with a licensing model to increase income and profits without thinking what their customers will think and do
last time the haven was M$ and hyper-v as no other real alternative, this time there is KVM on Linux as well as several other open source alternatives so I think Broadcom will pretty much kill VMware if they persist
and as to stripping all the small consultancies out of the partner network I think that is a reload and fire both barrels a 2nd time, its the same as IBM and java mass exodus time to open source
Seems like Broadcom's accelerating their less-than-enterprise size customers' run for the door.
Problem with that, as said by others, is that the remaining Big Players will see the uncertainty, the reduced availability of admins who trained up on the previously-cheap/free versions, the likelihood of increased costs as the customer pool contracts (hey the big money has to come from *somewhere*...), and accelerate their own run for the doors.
Prediction: Broadcom squeezes the life out of VMWare within five years, except for a handful of slow-to-migrate corps, and jettisons the zombified remains to some vulture capital outfit.
They are certainly acting like it.
guess I'm gonna have to learn KVM and either cope with Proxmox's UI, Nutanix's "we'd like to sell you a forklift upgrade for roughly the same price you'll pay for vmware support", Hyper-V and the unreliable mess that is Windows Server (even the core edition), or possibly the Morpheus thing that HPE bought- I need to research that one and see if it's worth adding to the proof of concept I'm running.
I don't know about you but if I worked at a non renewing partner I would be looking at low and no friction ways to move customers to Open source like Smart OS, ProxMox, KVM, or roll your own Xen and keep selling them support for that. failing that I might be attempting to become a Hyper V or other commercial solution partner like maybe the new citrix Xen thing. Helping Broadcom take customers away that I would not be doing voulntarily, big customers who have other services and want vmware, or customers who insist the must stay on VMWare because tech debt... maybe for the customers sake. Everyone else hell no why would anyone do that.
And I would add that the timing is pretty awful for Broadcom to be making enemies of the market. With AI becoming a large focus of many organizations (even if they have NO IDEA what "AI" really means to them yet), many orgs are coming back from hyperscalars and COLO's because they are worried about data storage costs and security. Essentially there is a pretty significant repatriation movement in progress, and it will likely pick up steam in the short term. Ultimate outcome? Many more VM's needed on-premise...and many customers lacking confidence in Broadcom/VMware...so looking for where they are going to land.
Hyper-V can/will do 90% of what most customers are leveraging VMware for, so that is a good bet. Nutanix is a decent idea as well, but it isn't a hypervisor, it is HCI, and there is a whole lot of understanding that needs to take place for an HCI platform to be a "long term" investment for typical hypervisor type workloads.
There is Proxmox, OpenShift, VergeIO, and quite a few others....but HPE has released VM Essentials, based on tried and true KVM, and already supports it on HPE, AND non-HPE hardware (Dell, Pure, and NetApp are on the compatibility list already), and there is already 3rd party backup investment/support from Veeam, Cohesity, Commvault.
Truth be told (and tea leaves to be read), I think this game is HPE's to lose! Broadcom's VMware profit this year and next may be impressive, but it will be an inverted hockey stick every year after that!
For those looking to pivot to another hypervisor...make sure you do your do diligence, just jumping without research will be a costly and problematic endeavor!
The VAR we use mentioned VM Essentials to us yesterday; my organization has to have vendors that are licensed to do business with us (tldr; I'm in a highly regulated industry), and that Broadcom is most likely going to be dropping this VAR from their list because they aren't big enough, so we won't be able to renew unless we find a different partner.
It's asinine, it's stupid, and most of all, I have enough on my plate already, but now I have to look at moving to a different virtualization platform, and the instability that entails.
Anon for reasons.
Since the previous shakeup and price increases, which happily coincided with a hardware refresh cycle, migrating to Nutanix has been very good, team are impressed with it and so far its done exactly what it said on the tin with no uncertainty of pricing or deliverables. It's hyper converged which is not a good money proposition if you are at the start or midway through your hardware lifecycle, but in this case the planets aligned and the move made both financial and downside risk sense.
> Then you have to try to find the patches in the new Broadcom portal
It was the same when they took over Symantec, they gutted it of all the (well paid) experienced people only to discover down the line that the product support tanked. And yes I feel your pain for the portal....
It won't surprise you that we switched over to Microsoft (big M$ company), I did not quite switch off the Symantec lights when I retired but it was getting jolly close.
The FreeBSD/TrueNAS devs and community uses to find bugs in the firmware of LSI's HBAs and develop fixes which LSI would add into the next firmware update. Since Broadcom acquired LSI they have stopped communicating with the community and now bugs go unfixed. The issue is that these same bugs also affect large scale integrators like Amazon who have started moving away from Broadcom HBAs due to the bugs.
> >Broadcom points to growing VMware revenue as evidence its approach is working.
> We all point to growing revenue as evidence that extortion is working.
All it means is that "so far" the price increases are outrunning the loss of customers....at some point the two lines on the graph will cross over
A lot of VARs do little more than shift paper for a margin cut.VMWare is not quite a commodity but it’s a pretty mature product. If you need it, you probably have it, So a VAR is mostly “Added”.
But pretty light on “Value”.
However, some VARs (I work with a couple good ones, can smell the other kind by their rancid Old Spice when they come in the lobby) actually DO engage in consultative selling, and can actually add value by opening their Rolodex (or digital equivalent thereof) and calling their former VMWare customers, and simply stating that Broadcom is gonna screw EVERYONE…so, let’s figure out which of these other solutions meet your needs and what a migration plan might look like…
I no longer play in pre-sales but if you are slinging any alternative to VMWAre…you could be going door to door right now (just like the channel did when they were getting the world onto VMWare in the first place). I do know a lot of the team that joined Nutanix in the last few months as former cow-orkers and I imagine they are doing to Broadcom’s install base what they once did to Dell EqualLogic and Compellant…
What a crock. Nothing but lies from the Broadcom team. Every provider should have an escape plan and should be executing right away! Nutanix is great, another option I have been tracking is US Signal Open Cloud. Looks interesting and it is built for enterprises and resellers. Modern API, pay as you go, nested customers, etc. Pricing from what they say is 30-50% less than AWS/Azure/VMware Providers, that could mean good margin for us without dealing with the hardware.
It takes time to make foundational changes, especially if it involves buying new hardware to replace hardware that still has some of the shiny on it, but doesn't have the new company's Official Seal of Approval(TM) (*coughs*Nutanix*wheeze*) or involves scaling a knowledge cliff to learn a new product.
