Ingram Micro To 'Stop Doing Business' With Broadcom, Downgrade To 'Limited Engagement' On VMware (theregister.com) 28
The Register's Simon Sharwood reports: Tech distribution behemoth Ingram Micro will stop doing business with Broadcom and its VMware range in many territories next year. In a statement sent to The Register, an Ingram spokesperson told us: "We were unable to reach an agreement with Broadcom that would help our customers deliver the best technology outcomes now and in the future while providing an appropriate shareholder return." That decision means that from "early January 2025, Ingram Micro will no longer be doing business with Broadcom and have limited engagement with VMware in select regions."
The distie told us this change is not material to its business, and customers and other vendors have been informed. "For us and the more than 1,500 vendors and 161,000 customers we work with, the future of business is focused on transforming relationships, not just transacting sales," the spokesperson explained. Ingram's decision is a challenge to Broadcom, which after acquiring VMware decided to emphasize services delivered through the channel for many customers. However, The Register has heard from VMware users who felt Ingram struggled to handle the increased responsibilities it assumed under this arrangement. We've been told of slow responses, and that Ingram struggled to replicate the expertise that pre-acquisition VMware's support teams delivered. Banter on social media suggests similar experiences were not uncommon.
Ingram's decision means VMware's channel has more change to digest, after a year in which Broadcom cancelled its partner program and created a new one that excluded some existing partners. Some of those partners ran small VMware-powered clouds, and faced being unable to secure licenses â" meaning their customers would have faced unwelcome disruption. Broadcom hastily created a scheme under which small resellers outside its cloud partner program could acquire licenses from bigger players. Another change to Broadcom's plans saw it cordon off 2,000 VMware customers to work with directly, rendering them off limits to its channel. It then diluted that decision by deciding it will work direct with only 500 VMware users. Resellers that don't have relationships with distributors other than Ingram will now need to make friends -- fast.
The distie told us this change is not material to its business, and customers and other vendors have been informed. "For us and the more than 1,500 vendors and 161,000 customers we work with, the future of business is focused on transforming relationships, not just transacting sales," the spokesperson explained. Ingram's decision is a challenge to Broadcom, which after acquiring VMware decided to emphasize services delivered through the channel for many customers. However, The Register has heard from VMware users who felt Ingram struggled to handle the increased responsibilities it assumed under this arrangement. We've been told of slow responses, and that Ingram struggled to replicate the expertise that pre-acquisition VMware's support teams delivered. Banter on social media suggests similar experiences were not uncommon.
Ingram's decision means VMware's channel has more change to digest, after a year in which Broadcom cancelled its partner program and created a new one that excluded some existing partners. Some of those partners ran small VMware-powered clouds, and faced being unable to secure licenses â" meaning their customers would have faced unwelcome disruption. Broadcom hastily created a scheme under which small resellers outside its cloud partner program could acquire licenses from bigger players. Another change to Broadcom's plans saw it cordon off 2,000 VMware customers to work with directly, rendering them off limits to its channel. It then diluted that decision by deciding it will work direct with only 500 VMware users. Resellers that don't have relationships with distributors other than Ingram will now need to make friends -- fast.
I'm done with VMware (25 years) (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a consultant and own the firm. We are migrating our SMBs to Proxmox. I spent quite a while (25 years) getting to grips with VMware and I am absolutely livid (and also mildly sanguine!)
The world turns and we all have to adjust. I do find it rather distasteful how many people and businesses like me and ours have been treated without any consideration - we were their experts and we are now running away in droves.
A short term profit will be all they get.
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Re:I'm done with VMware (25 years) (Score:5, Interesting)
no shit (Score:1)
Broadcom is basically a private equity firm when it comes to software acquisitions. They buy the company, cut costs to make the company's future bleak and milk the customers for all they are worth. They eek out a moderate profit when all is said and done. This is not done to healthy companies, this is done to "over-mature" companies who are about to enter a spiral of falling revenue and cost-cutting. Instead of just letting the company die from complications of old age, the company is slaughtered for money.
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Large enterprises are bailing too. Broadcom really doesn't seem to care. After seeing how they shafted Computer Associates customers, it wasn't surprising to see how they ran roughshod over VMWare customers.
Good riddance.
The jackpot is all they wanted (Score:2)
They wanted that initial jackpot and then the residual revenue in perpetuity for the one or two companies that won't move off the software for some reason. This is how CA, now owned by Broadcom, managed to survive after 1993.
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Re: I'm done with VMware (25 years) (Score:5, Informative)
Re: I'm done with VMware (25 years) (Score:4, Informative)
vmotion and clustering are just rebuilding the mainframe with commodity hardware and badly with all kinds of weird bottlenecks and performance surprises.
From a technical stand point as "interesting" as it all might be I think it was/is an evolutionary dead end. What it 'gave' businesses in the mid 2000s was a way to uplift their non-HA software architectures into an HA world. It also solved a lot strange legacy licensing problems where SQL pick your flavor was just fabulously expensive to licenses for any sorta cluster/log shipping w/fail over arrangement.
Most of the software cost problems have been addressed, or you no longer get it any cheaper running a single instance in a VM anyway. The industry has since learned to build HA stuff in a way that individuals hosts can fail. Be it docker, k8s, home grown, or, pick your cloud native solutions. You can achieve up times as good with hicups shorter than vmotion a zillion better ways, even if you have to resort to vIPs and tcp state replication.
If its piloting the car in traffic at 70mph you need special hardware, for all other HA problems, there is generally something more natural, flexible, maintainable, and cheaper than trying to keep fat-virtual-hosts online, with all the checkpoint and migration overhead therein.
Don't get me wrong, virtualization and clustering of virtualization solutions are not going anywhere but live-migraton-as-an-HA-solution was a transition technology and its had its day.
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Same here. I moved away from VMWare a couple of years ago. Been running Proxmox in production since, with zero problems.
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A short term profit will be all they get.
It is Broadcom. They probably cannot see beyond the short-term anyways. Eventually that will kill them.
Why no Broadcom effect? (Score:2)
When Broadcom shows any kind of credible interest in an acquisition, it should cause the valuation of that target to drop like a fucking stone and clients to start fleeing while the fleeing is good.
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I was thinking "Wouldnt it be the other way around?". Apparently not. Intel is only(!) worth 88bil.
How TF is broadcom woth 1.12 tril dollars?
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How TF is broadcom woth 1.12 tril dollars?
Because in a perverted and instable system. short-term greed pays. For a while.
Re:Why no Broadcom effect? (Score:4, Insightful)
When Broadcom shows any kind of credible interest in an acquisition, it should cause the valuation of that target to drop like a fucking stone and clients to start fleeing while the fleeing is good.
If Broadcom shows interest in an acquisition, making that purchase cheaper might not become the deterrent you expect.
Someone has to say it: F Broadcom (Score:1)
VMware whom? Twenty years ago sure. But now. F Broadcom.
The quote that most people should hate (Score:1)
I read this, and that makes me feel that Ingram could just go away because the focus is in the wrong place: "We were unable to reach an agreement with Broadcom that would help our customers deliver the best technology outcomes now and in the future while providing an appropriate shareholder return."
No one should care or support, "appropriate shareholder return" as any sort of justification. Saying it's not profitable, or it's not good for customers/clients, that's all good, but the focus of the business s
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You're correct, of course. But that read, to me, as just more business mumbo-jumbo you can just as easily translate into, "Bastards want to charge too much for licensing and our customers will never pay that much for it."
Bottom line here is still the same. We all knew Broadcom buying VMWare meant the product was going to start dying out.
And just a personal observation... but from my experience, some years back, using it in a smaller business? Even before Broadcom got involved, they were "license nazis", des
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The real problem is when these corporations are more interested in making shareholders happy than in actually running the business well. That is why Intel is now in the toilet, because the leadership forgot how to make running the business the thing to focus on.
Broadcom = stupid (Score:2)
Way to kill the golden fucking goose, dumbass Broadcom executives.
TBH, I saw this coming when they laid off the entire Workstation team a few years ago - and moved immediately to Virtualbox. Now I'm on Proxmox.