After 114 Days of Change, Broadcom CEO Acknowledges VMware-Related 'Unease' (arstechnica.com) 42
In a blog post Thursday, Broadcom CEO and President Hock Tan acknowledged the discomfort VMware customers and partners have experienced after the sweeping changes that Broadcom has instituted since it acquired the company nearly four months ago. "Of course, we recognize that this level of change has understandably created some unease among our customers and partners," writes Tan. "But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster, meeting our customers' needs more effectively, and making it easier to do business with us." Ars Technica reports: Tan believes that the changes will ultimately "provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities" for channel partners. However, many IT solution provider businesses that were working with VMware have already been disrupted. For example, after buying VMware, Broadcom took over the top 2,000 VMware accounts from VMware channel partners. In a March earnings call, Tan said that Broadcom has been focused on upselling those customers. He also said Broadcom expects VMware revenue to grow double-digits quarter over quarter for the rest of the fiscal year. [...]
In his blog post, Tan defended the subscription-only licensing model, calling it "the industry standard." He said VMware started accelerating its transition to this strategy in 2019, (which is before Broadcom bought VMware). He also linked to a February blog post from VMware's Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product and technical marketing for the Cloud, Infrastructure, Platforms, and Solutions group at VMware, that also noted acquisition-related "concerns" but claimed the evolution would be fiscally prudent.
In his blog post, Tan defended the subscription-only licensing model, calling it "the industry standard." He said VMware started accelerating its transition to this strategy in 2019, (which is before Broadcom bought VMware). He also linked to a February blog post from VMware's Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product and technical marketing for the Cloud, Infrastructure, Platforms, and Solutions group at VMware, that also noted acquisition-related "concerns" but claimed the evolution would be fiscally prudent.
They're losing money (Score:2)
I know this won't sink Broadcom and the CEO will ride his golden parachute to an even higher-paying job, but it's fun to watch.
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It's a deliberate strategy to no longer invest in improving a company they've decided is dead. It's why they bought it. Short term profit until they discard the corpse.
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I think the big question is that when they sell its corpse, does it go to OpenText, Rocket, Unicom, or HCL?
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.. the CEO will ride his golden parachute to an even higher-paying job ..
That would be a golden jet-pack.
Yup (Score:5, Insightful)
Tan defended the subscription-only licensing model, calling it "the industry standard."
The monthly subscription fees for my KVM/QEMU Windows 10 VM on my Linux Mint system are killing me. /sarcasm
(Yes, I get that the VMware ecosystem has a lot to offer, but never underestimate the ingenuity of a team on a budget with access to alternate free tools...)
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That's why Hyper-V is horrifyingly popular.
Interesting omission (Score:3)
Not how the customer doesn't come up at all in that, other than the implied role of forking over ever increasing amounts of cash.
Perhaps it's time to spend that cash on personnel skilled enough to not need VMware's training wheels rather than flushing rent down the crapper forever more.
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I liked your post, but one thing irked me.
Lack of live migration and software san integration means we will be back in the dark ages, when taking hardware offline for maintenance means users notice things rebooting.
KVM has had live migration since 2007. This functionality has bled through into enterprise platforms such as RHV and OpenShift-Virt.
But you're right:
Hopefully this will be the wakeup call for vmware alternatives to up their game, now that there is a metric crap ton of funding soon to be freed up.
This has absolutely put the wind in the sails (Sales? Hah! Pardon the pun) of the vmware alternatives. There's a large technology push to get the competitors primed (feature-wise) to start wooing existing VMware customers.
Re: Interesting omission (Score:1)
I donâ(TM)t know under what rock youâ(TM)ve been living, but KVM had live migration and SAN integration before VMware. Pretty much any product out there that relies on KVM (RHV, Ubuntu, OpenStack, Proxmox, Nutanix) has all the features that VMware performs poorly and more.
Industry Standard? (Score:2)
If subscription was industry standard (as Broadcom is saying it is), and VMWare was defining the industry, then VMWare would have already been subscription-based.
That part of the statement seems wishful. At best.
Yeah right (Score:5, Informative)
I have 130+ vmware servers. The very day I heard broadcoms plans I started prepping a proxmox based replacement for my servers. It will be ready for primetime in about 2 more weeks. I will not rent software and any company that forces me to cloud to subscription based models will be promptly told where to stick it. The next server that I roll out will be proxmox. Every server failure or upgrade will be replaced with proxmox until vmware is gone from my systems. Good riddance. I was on the edge with vmware's tactics even before Broadcom, it didn't take much to push me over the edge.
Re: Yeah right (Score:4, Interesting)
Reading the quote from the CEO made me want to strangle him with his tie, and reading your words is a breath of fresh air and I thank you for your existence and effort.
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Smart man.
Some guys like you will get sweetheart offers to not switch and then you get the hose after a short while.
If Proxmox handles your needs you're emblematic of folks who will realize they didn't even need VMware.
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
For some, it's larger than a forklift upgrade; they're highly invested into the ecosystem and it rocks their world to change. These are captive, but This Is The Way of the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, and others.
The rest of those pesky customers can go eff off because they weren't worth it in support costs to VMWare.
This is where innovation ends, the Oil Well Stage. The skies will darken, and eventually the crude runs dry, but we laughed to the banks.
VMWare was once highly innovative.... until they weren't.
Re: Yeah right (Score:2)
VMWare was once highly innovative.... until they weren't
More than that they had a focus on ease of use. Totally enterprise grade software, rock solid advanced clustering, redundancy and failover features, a custom clustered filesystem, packaged up all pretty with the thoughtfulness of mass market SMB or mom and pop software. Because they started out making desktop software? Idk but shame it didn't last :/
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They broke the one-server-one-function and virtualization that was systematic. This broke Microsoft and their hardware friends who'd been stacking stupid racks of servers to become systems.
Optimizing workflows, having been achieved, also sparked the imagination of those that evolved Sun Jails, then Linux parallels (no pun intended) that were far more efficient at task isolation and containment. Rogue stuff could be walled.
Only highly rusted apps run on Windows servers these days. The era of needing to conta
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We’ve rolled everything over to Proxmox. No regrets!
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If you truly had 130 vmware servers, you would know that these changes have no bearing on your current installations and only new ones.
Someone lying on Slashdot? Surely not.
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If you truly had 130 vmware servers, you would know that these changes have no bearing on your current installations and only new ones.
Are you always this short-sighted?
Someone lying on Slashdot? Surely not.
Does your personal ignorance somehow force you to accuse others of being liars?
Pissing yourself to keep warm... for the next 5min (Score:2)
The Broadcom MBAs are diving VMware straight into the ground in search of more speed and acceleration while they all have their golden parachutes on and are heading to the door. Another IBM / HCL disaster and Oracle debacle in the making.
They don't care for the long term health nor outlook of the company and don't give a rat's ass if the big players have enough cushion to catch the company fall while they bail out early.
The large enterprises and government departments that had their contracts pulled away f
Wow! (Score:1)
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Not to mention (Score:2)
Well, duh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hock Tan must be surrounding himself with nothing but yes-men who are either unable or unwilling to tell him 'no' once in a while.
The problem with Broadcom acquisitions are 1.) that there have been a lot of them, and 2.) that there aren't *any* examples of a company acquired by Broadcom where the actual-customers (not the shareholders, the people who pay invoices) have been *happier* as a result of the acquisition. Brocade products aren't better, Symantec software isn't better, LSI products aren't better...they're all just more expensive.
So, when Broadcom bought VMWare, Tan's immediate reaction was, effectively, Let's Go Whaling!" [youtube.com]. The problem is that VMWare has a longer long-tail of customers, and those top-10% customers VMWare planned to extort would have the resources to make Nutanix or Xen or Proxmox work in their environments, at least partially.
Meanwhile, a nontrivial number of VMWare customers likely either preferred Capex licensing, or expressly didn't want the monthly fees associated with The Cloud(tm). To not only require subscriptions, but to require subscriptions that were likely higher than cloud services was to cause chaos in both the IT department *and* the accounting department.
Of course, it's all summed up by the plan to "provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities". Broadcom doesn't have a track record of improving products, and Tan's statements on the matter make it clear that his goals for the foreseeable future are solely based on revenue, rather than product improvement or service enhancements.
Put it all together, and the unfortunate reality is that the damage is done. Even if Tan reinstates perpetual licenses, Essentials packs, and the free hypervisor, AND restructures the pricing to be merely "5% more than you paid last year", the reputation has been irreparably damaged.
Tan may have gotten away with it with Brocade and Symantec, but it's entirely possible that shareholders will be out for blood if Q2 revenue reflects the fact that even the whales are seeking alternatives.
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Called it (Score:2)
Turns out that their customers are all rapidly transitioning to KVM (on Proxmox):
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
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Re: Called it (Score:1)
Which is the biggest problem I have seen in nearby VMware shops. All the VMware sysadmins are glorified button monkeys. Canâ(TM)t even install Linux or Windows without some button and a set of tools from third parties.
And now companies are quickly looking for alternatives before their license costs quadruple, all the VMware partners have already gotten the boot with hundreds of people laid off and those people have zero skills.
Iâ(TM)ve seen resumes with 15 years of experience and no clue how to do
I detect a trend (Score:4, Informative)
Enshittification [wikipedia.org] is now the dominant economic model.
Don't fuck your partners (Score:2)
This is a great way to get your channel partners to migrate to anything but VMware, which was already happening, but now is accelerating. Good job. You'll increase revenue temporarily, but you've lost the long game.
The usual CEO BS (Score:2)
Quadrupled licensing costs = easy decision-making (Score:2)
"But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster, meeting our customers' needs more effectively, and making it easier to do business with us."
He makes a good point here -- having our licensing costs quadruple has made it easier to do business with vmware, in that we will no longer be doing business with vmware.
Dear Mr. Tan (Score:2)
FTFY.
Vulture capitalism (Score:2)
Treatment of VMware staff in merger told me everyt (Score:1)
LOL (Score:2)
I mean I know what my clients are doing after they had their lifetime licenses revoked after a month.
Switching to xcp-ng is about half of it.
Liar (Score:2)
How do you tell Hock Tan is lying? His lips are moving.
ESXI maintenance and investment dropping off (Score:2)
It looks like VMWare is now all-in on Cloud Foundation and are planning on investing around $400 million over the next year+ on this product. ESXI is a cash-cow and is being technically abandoned -- everyone using it really needs to be