EU cloud gang challenges Broadcom's $61B VMWare buy in court

Trade group Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) has filed a formal appeal before the European General Court to seek annulment of the European Commission's decision to approve Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. In a statement sent to The Register, CISPE claims "errors in law and manifest failures by the …

[ParlezVousFranglais]

True that Broadcom will fight this ferociously, however, the dual threats of a) protracted legal costs, and b) the EU taking a completely separate regulatory interest in Broadcom's recent decisions regarding VMWare, might even now cause Broadcom to reflect on it's course, and that, I am guessing, is the likely reason for this action, rather than any hope of real success in court.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

That ship has sailed

Broadcom has its hooks too deeply into VMware to be prised loose at this point. The fact is, as mentioned in the article, that there's plenty of nominal competition to VMware. Granted, no other product is as mature as VMware, and Broadcom probably holds some significant patents which limit competitors' capabilities, but those facts probably won't be enough to sway the competition authorities. IANAL, so I could very well be wrong, but I will be shocked if I am.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: That ship has sailed

"Broadcom has its hooks too deeply into VMware to be prised loose at this point."

Their problem if the court rules against them.

[sedregj]

Re: That ship has sailed

"Broadcom has its hooks too deeply into VMware "

Bollocks. What on earth does that mean?

A business or business unit with or without a clearly defined "edge" can be flogged off or divested or whatever.

"Granted, no other product is as mature as VMware"

Oh gods.

I was a VMware fanboi for roughly 20 years. No more thank you very much. I remember when ESX was RedHat n that and GSX was frankly weird. ESXi has repeatedly "appropriated" from Linux and *BSD. A vCenter is or was SLES with a couple of Tomcats and a horrendous number of virty discs and massive overkill for a control freak system.

You can have CDP on what was the small business version or LLDP on the eye wateringly expensive effort that seems to have pinched rather a lot of Openvswitch. You only get storage vMotion and DRS on the expensive effort.

The product line has lurched from MVP to MVP with bugs that are laughable, over the years. Product quality has improved over the bad old days (say <2020) but you have absolutely no flexibility - an ESXi is a "black box". You can't even open port 123/UDP to monitor NTP - you can fiddle with PowerCLI but that is not independent.

I could go on at some length.

"Mature": LOL! Its MVP all the way ... baby.

[katrinab]

Obviously we knew this situation was going to happen, and it did happen.

The thing is though, it didn't reduce the number of suppliers you could buy virtualisation software from, as Broadcom didn't have any virtualisation software products before the acquisition. Broadcom hasn't made VMWare so that it only works on Broadcom hardware or Broadcom hardware so that it only works on VMWare, and people are moving to the competition; so I don't really know what the EU can legally do about it.

[druck]

The best thing the EU can do is to let Broadcom continue to destroy the VMWare business, and allow it's customers learn a valuable lesson about the risk of vendor lock-in with large US firms.

Anyone who has migrated to another closed source solution, better be be planning for their next migration now.