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Because they are raising prices more than 10 fold in some circumstances and Broadcom has a storied history of acquiring good companIes and destroying their product and running the company into the ground for short term profits.
Electronic Hardware companies typically will have some software offerings to help boost their hardware businesses as well as help “lock in” their customers to their hardware. Some notable examples of businesses doing this would be Nvidia and their CUDA software stack, Apple and their OSs.
These software offerings can make it difficult to switch to a different hardware vendor that might be cheaper or maybe have different offerings. This difficultly happens because it would cost both time and money to switch to using the new software.
With all that, it is common for hardware companies to buy software companies to increase their software offerings to try and get more hardware sales. It also isn’t uncommon that down the road that future development on the software they just bought to be limited to only their software.
So tech companies are looking for other alternatives to VMware now in case Broadcom decides locks VMware to operate only on their hardware.
VMWare used to be cutting-edge. It provided a great way for admins to isolate environments, scale systems, and control resource allocation, all on a single machine. Oh-so very enterprise, and secure too.
Unfortunately, VM’s just aren’t the best option for this anymore. Enterprise orgs all across the globe have been re-architecting their infrastructure to deploy onto containers, which do the same job, at a significantly lower resource cost, along with a long list of other benefits including cost savings.
This isn’t to say that VMs are going away anytime soon. Lots of orgs *arent* changing their infrastructure, and VM’s are still the best solution for providing a virtual workstation.
The acquisition might just be the last piece of business-case that architects need in order to get their CTO’s to sponsor an expensive migration.
Broadcom has a history of buying successful companies that have limited potential for future growth and running them into the dirt. It’s a form of Vulture Capitalism, benefiting and profiting from companies on the down slope instead of investing and making them successful again.
They did this with Symantec and are using the exact same playbook with VMware.
They bought the company, immediately laid off much of the staff and raised prices on their products.
Since a lot of Fortune 500 companies are woefully dependent on running VMware, Broadcom is betting that they can’t afford to change to an alternative and will just accept the price increases which so far has been the case.
An enterprise can’t pivot off such an integrated product like VMware in a month, it will be a 5-year project at the least.
90% of VMware’s income comes from just the top 500 customers, so the concerns of the majority of VMware customers like the SMB market are being totally ignored while they face steep contract renewals and increased prices as well.
Meanwhile Broadcom is cutting out most of their resellers to force customers to renew through select partners and VMware themselves to help maintain the higher rates and control.
VMware had a history of being a very innovative company, but is believed to have “missed the boat” in the Cloud market by not offering a Cloud Competitor to the likes of AWS or Azure. VMware has never been a hardware company but neither was Amazon or Microsoft. VMware was simply charging too much for the product to be competitive in this space and so never partnered with anyone to spin up cloud datacenters which feels like a massive missed opportunity. Since on-prem virtualization is on the down slope VMware has been investing in other products likes their Kubernetes platform Tanzu and AV product Carbonblack but without resounding success. Meanwhile their core product ESX has gotten non-substantial updates for years and many keys features that competitors are now offering for free remain stuck behind a licensing paywall.
Carbon Black and other divisions are now being sold off to make a quick buck.
Meanwhile Broadcoms plan is to squeeze as many dollars out of VMware’s customers as it can without investing in RnD for the future of the company. They are shrinking the workforce to keep profits high at the expense of everything else and it’s clear that they intend to gut the company to the bare minimum.
Meanwhile all the good people at VMware have already jumped ship, as Broadcom’s CEO Hock Tan is notorious for his draconian workplace policies including RTO (Return To Office) killing all of VMware’s remote worker policies and changing the corporate culture for the worse. Seeing the writing on the wall many key engineers jumped ship to competitors like Microsoft, Nutanix, and Google.
So the safe money is to abandon ship and switch to VMware’s competitors like Azure Stack HCL and Nutanix, but these products have their own problems.
VMware has been a leader in the Virtualization space for a long time for a reason, but their stagnation in the past decade has now cost them.
They only real winners here are Broadcom’s shareholders and Michael Dell who sold the company for bank.
As a long term customer and massive VMWare fan, F*** them and the horse they road in on.
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