[HN Gopher] Broadcom to Acquire VMware for $61B
___________________________________________________________________
Broadcom to Acquire VMware for $61B
Author : squidofbits
Score : 471 points
Date : 2022-05-26 11:48 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| meling wrote:
| This could be bad news for all the great researchers that moved
| to VMware after Microsoft closed their Silicon Valley research
| division...
| jka wrote:
| For anyone curious about potential open-source migration options
| given the prospect of uncertainty around VMware pricing and
| support:
|
| - xcp-ng[1] is a support-available fork of XenServer.
| Migration[2] can be performed using export to OVA format and
| subsequent import into the built-in Xen-Orchestra interface.
|
| - proxmox-ve[3] provides a management UI for Linux Virtual
| Machine (LVM) and Linux Containers (LXC) hosts and provides
| various vendor migration guides[4]. Both commercial and community
| support[5] is available.
|
| - The Xen Hypervisor[6] is capable of hosting x86 and ARM virtual
| hosts, and their project provides a VMware migration guide[7]
|
| [1] - https://xcp-ng.com/
|
| [2] - https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migratetoxcpng.html#from-vmware
|
| [3] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve
|
| [4] -
| https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox...
|
| [5] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/support
|
| [6] - https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/
|
| [7] - https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Migration_from_VMware
| CameronNemo wrote:
| There is also Openstack, oVirt, and LXD (does KVM now).
| rwmj wrote:
| virt-v2v can import VMs from VMware to QEMU/KVM-based systems.
| https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html
| whalesalad wrote:
| VMWare is being passed around like the village bicycle.
| EarthIsHome wrote:
| Holy crap! Look at these acquisitions:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware#Acquisitions
| mkl wrote:
| Those are companies that VMware acquired, not companies that
| acquired VMware.
| EarthIsHome wrote:
| Whoops! Totally misunderstood that page. Thanks for
| pointing it out.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Can we like... stop building these ginormous conglomerates?
| Thanks.
| fourstar wrote:
| Sure right after we dismember NATO. Oh wait...
|
| EDIT: NATO shills don't like this comment!
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| If intellectual property (specifically software patents) were
| weakened, this would be less of a problem, right?
|
| Companies don't buy companies, they buy IP, as I understand it.
| alberth wrote:
| Consolidation in mature markets inevitably happens.
| nousermane wrote:
| ...absent functioning antitrust legislation, yes.
| streblo wrote:
| Is there an antitrust case to be made here? Antitrust
| means a lot more than just 'big company'.
| nicoburns wrote:
| You seem to be asking if there is a case within current
| legislation. Whereas the parent is suggesting that more
| cases ought to be covered by future stricter legislation
| (which could at least in principle be as simple as "big
| company").
| [deleted]
| mc32 wrote:
| So you put a cap in it, what happens, mitosis?
|
| I'm not sure it would have that big of an effect. It
| would certainly help in some areas like search and social
| networks though.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kortilla wrote:
| No, not in the software industry. Nothing VMware has in pure
| IP is that special. I can't think of any of the big tech
| companies that even use VMware.
|
| Broadcom is paying for the huge enterprise customer base,
| sales and support connections, mindshare, and engineering org
| that has proven adaptable to market demands.
| ergonaught wrote:
| You don't have to think, you can just browse their list,
| filter by industry, and have fun as you will:
|
| https://www.vmware.com/company/customers/index.html#
| grumple wrote:
| Note that this is just a tiny subset of companies that
| use VMWare (those that have writeups). I've worked for
| some very big companies that used it but aren't listed.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > I can't think of any of the big tech companies that even
| use VMware.
|
| I would be shocked if every single 'big' tech company
| didn't use _some_ vmware product _somewhere_ internally.
| Their software portfolio is a hell of a lot bigger than
| just the actual vmware product. Example: where I work we
| use the vmware product Carbon Black for 'endpoint
| protection', which as I understand it is virus scanning +
| some amount of port monitoring.
| cagataygurturk wrote:
| > I can't think of any of the big tech companies that even
| use VMware.
|
| You are quite wrong...
| davidandgoliath wrote:
| Uh, except everyone that uses VMWare, which is a massive
| list.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Out of the five Big Tech companies (FAANG - Netflix + MS),
| three have their own cloud divisions and one (Apple) does
| partially use AWS and Azure.
| rejectfinite wrote:
| Such a silicon valley HN comment holy shit.
|
| https://www.vmware.com/company/customers/index.html#
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Maaaaaybe. I am not a fan of software patents but
| intellectual property laws are the only thing stopping Big
| Company A from just cloning Small Company B's product. At
| least now they have to go to the trouble of buying them.
|
| Of course, it goes both ways and laws often favor the strong
| against the weak. But it is not all one-sided.
| netr0ute wrote:
| > Big Company A from just cloning Small Company B's product
|
| That's called competition
| erklik wrote:
| > intellectual property laws are the only thing stopping
| Big Company A from just cloning Small Company B's product
|
| Is that really the case? Does it work? Isn't Instagram
| basically cloning TIkTok right now? and cloned Snap before
| that?
|
| Apple with Alfred, Spotlight, F.lux etc are also examples.
| Seems like for software, either patents aren't utilized or
| simply can't be enforced.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Instragram/TikTok/Snap aren't exactly novel ideas, the
| only valuable thing about them are the brands (also
| intellectual property but not what we are talking about).
|
| I only know VMWare from its days as virtualization
| software. I would put money on them having had a bunch of
| patents on the specific techniques they used.
|
| Software patents sometimes work out, sometimes not. If I
| were king of the world I wouldn't get rid of them but
| narrow the scope down to protecting specific
| implementations, none of this "Buying stuff of the
| internet" pantenting that invested the 00s.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Wasn't there a whole thing about big tech companies
| interviewing small companies as if to acquire them and then
| just cloning the product anyways?
| captaincaveman wrote:
| Most small companies don't have patents, or ones that
| matter.
| efficax wrote:
| competition requires consolidation in order to acquire new
| lines of profit, it's inevitable
| pooper wrote:
| > competition requires consolidation in order to acquire new
| lines of profit, it's inevitable
|
| It may be inevitable but I think I have a solid idea to at
| least check its explosive growth.
|
| The CEO and the board (includes President) ought to be
| personally civil as well as criminally liable for any actions
| of the employees, contractors, or agents of the company if
| they cannot prove that the employees, contractors, or agents
| acted against company policy. Elimination of the "right to
| work" is a precondition to this proposal.
| ronnier wrote:
| We can but asia won't. We can stop and let Asian tech giants
| eat us alive.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I may have missed something but hasn't China recently
| demonstrated that it absolutely is not willing to let its
| tech giants get too big and powerful. Take a look at what has
| happened with BABA.
| Sakos wrote:
| China doesn't care about the size of companies. Alibaba ran
| into political problems because they wanted to compete in
| an industry with established players with strong relations
| to regional governments and different parts of the CCP.
| babelfish wrote:
| Source?
| upupandup wrote:
| really bizarre that you blame Asians when tech giants exist
| in other regions. Really didn't expect to see this dog
| whistling on HN.
|
| Also are you talking about Israel or Bangladesh? They are in
| Asia too.
| serf wrote:
| >really bizarre that you blame Asians when tech giants
| exist in other regions.
|
| it's not bizarre in the least if you consider any of the
| metrics that attempt to quantify corporate size and
| holdings.
|
| Here's a market cap index[0], do you notice anything?
|
| One thing that I notice is that every company in the top 25
| is either American (.. or by some legal stretches, Irish)
| or from somewhere in Asia.
|
| >Really didn't expect to see this dog whistling on HN.
|
| "We can stop and let Asian tech giants eat us alive." is
| neither coded, nor suggestive -- nor is it written in such
| a way as to avoid condemnation or blame, It's a plain
| statement.
|
| Can you describe how it's a dog whistle, and to signal
| which faction? I don't get it.
|
| Asia is too vast for a group of people to be against the
| entirety, no? At least I haven't ran into the anti-Asia
| faction, yet; but I have ran into plenty of anti-country
| folks.
|
| [0]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-
| companies-b...
| [deleted]
| parkingrift wrote:
| You're saying "Asia" but you're really referring to China.
|
| There is no reason for the west to allow Chinese companies to
| compete in their markets. Reciprocal market access or no
| access at all.
|
| If western trade agreements forbid companies of a certain
| size from selling locally there is no alternative for Asian
| companies but to split or exit the market. We aren't helpless
| passengers on a worldwide economic joyride.
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| A lot of America's wealth comes from being competitive on a
| global scale. Google is popular not only in the U.S., but
| also in Europe and the rest of the Americas. Apple sells
| phones, computers, and service all over the world. People
| use these products because they're best-in-class. We may be
| able to protect the domestic market, but the international
| market will not be as forgiving.
| beambot wrote:
| Samsung, Toyota, Sony, TSMC?
| SSLy wrote:
| Oh no
| https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/uxucz4/if_vm...
| 0x53 wrote:
| Linked by Reddit poster: https://kicksec.io/vmware-too-big-to-
| fail/
| ra7 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > My hope is that Michael Dell vetos this merger, from my
| accounts of Michael and the people I know who are employed by
| Dell, Michael is a great leader and a good human being and
| that is the most important thing, not profit at any cost.
|
| I don't know if the author is serious. This deal has Michael
| Dell financial engineering written all over it. He's not
| going to veto anything. Dell is all about enriching himself
| with moves like this rather organically grow a company.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| This feels way too pessimistic, VMware got big before open
| source virtualization took off.
|
| I imagine someone could use docker instead of VMware in most
| cases, and if that's not possible then hire some people to make
| it so.
|
| Vendor lockin is a scary thing, the people who are really going
| to hurt here are mega super corps who are now going to have to
| pay out the nose. If you're a smaller company, you should be
| moving to docker or another open source solution anyway.
| zerkten wrote:
| It's not purely a case of vendor lock-in, but that shouldn't
| be downplayed too much. Virtualization is still very much
| applicable for the legacy applications which are still
| prevalent. New apps may run in containers, but it's not just
| a few big companies running ancient legacy software.
|
| When you refer to smaller company and mention docker, or open
| source, it's only those that are tech startups, or close to
| the field with the skill to operate in this fashion. The
| majority of small and medium companies don't have the skills
| or resources to do this. Over time that changes, but it's
| completely unrealistic to think that they can get away
| quickly from VMware (even when their overworked IT person
| would like to.)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Then we have a market for a nice UI wrapper around Docker
| which provides a display render.
|
| You can run Windows in a docker container so this would
| support legacy applications.
|
| I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not insurmountable. If
| all else fails, Virtual box is open source
| mrweasel wrote:
| VMware has a ton of product, none of them really competes
| with Docker. They do have Tanzu I suppose, but that more a
| Kubernetes offering.
|
| I would argue that there are more Docker containers running
| on a VM, running on top of VMware than there are Docker
| containers running on bare metal servers.
|
| Both VMs and containers can be used and misused in a number
| of ways, but rarely can you replace a VM on VMware ESXi with
| Docker. There's still a massive business case for VMware and
| the only real competitors are Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix
| XenServer (if it's still called that).
|
| You also have to remember that there's a crazy big Microsoft
| world out there, Docker and containers still aren't of much
| use here. While this could run on Hyper-V, many just pick
| ESXi because it's what they know (No one was ever fired for
| choosing VMware).
| 999900000999 wrote:
| You can run Windows in Docker.
|
| Ether figure it out now, or in 2 years when VMware starts
| to suck.
|
| Then again, all the big companies I know put things off
| until the last moment.
|
| If I was a better developer I'd be putting together a
| project right now that allows you to run all your happy
| legacy Windows software with Docker.
|
| Shouldn't be hard to raise a bit of funding for such a
| project assuming you have the right background.
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| Citrix Xenserver is now called Citrix Hypervisor and there
| was also a fork of Xenserver by a French company called
| Vates and they have an opensource version called XCP-NG.
| Vates offer support and other addons.
| mvdwoord wrote:
| Ever tried to manage 50.000 production vms? Whith a mix of
| applications which cannot be easily containerized... Vcenter,
| vrops, NSX, etc . You could reinvent, build in house. Or you
| can buy VMware with support. What would the regulator prefer?
|
| But, this does offer incentive for outsiders to create
| competitive stacks.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| This 1000%. And this applies to a huge percentage of very
| large orgs/ISPs/telecoms/fortune 500s, etc. VMware for the
| most part "just works" and is entrenched in these
| companies, much like AD.
|
| If you are rolling your own replacement of VMware, what
| happens if a couple (or even say 20 out of your 5000) of
| your "parent" hosts go down. Will all of your guests auto-
| migrate to healthy hosts?
|
| And we are not talking about Kubernetes or similar here.
| That is very different. You don't roll your own VMware
| alternative. You just use VMware.
| metamet wrote:
| > I imagine someone could use docker instead of VMware in
| most cases, and if that's not possible then hire some people
| to make it so.
|
| It's been a few years since I've worked with bare metal, but
| doesn't Docker require a hypervisor for the containers?
|
| You could swap to KVM or Hyper-V, but transitioning an org's
| hypervisor on bare metal is a massive task any way you cut
| it.
| [deleted]
| electroly wrote:
| No, docker doesn't require a hypervisor of any kind.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| No, Docker is not a hypervisor and doesn't use one unless
| you need to add one for security reasons; it uses Linux
| features to build containers. On the other hand, yes
| switching from virtual machines to containers it is likely
| to be a non-trivial workflow change and not something a
| company can do on a dime.
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| No hypervisor for cgroups (docker & friends), no. Which is
| why something like LXD/LXC outperforms hypervisor
| virtualization by quite a bit.
|
| I was on a team that ran performance critical stuff for a
| reasonable sized ecommerce business - moving from vmware to
| bare metal was fantastic on every level from api's to
| performance and reliability.
|
| The enterprise spirit is stong in vmware.
| technion wrote:
| It's relevant that they are talking about VMware's security
| portfolio.
|
| The vast majority of why people are VMware proponents is down
| to their virtualisation software. It's why we were big
| resellers for a while. But for the last few years, their own
| sales people have only wanted to talk about security products,
| quite plainly acknowledging stagnant growth in on premise
| virtualisation.
|
| But virtualisation is in my view the only place they've made it
| big. You've just linked a Reddit post in /r/cybersecurity
| talking about security products and every reply is about how to
| replace ESXi. It'll be interesting to see how their future pans
| out.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| This. Virtualisation has been commodified - cloud,
| kubernetes, docker, hyper-v, even virtualbox. Whereas
| securing a decade's worth of on-prem infrastructure is a real
| pain-point for enterprises.
|
| VMware Workstation blew my mind when I saw it demoed in (I
| think) mid-2000 [1]. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was
| seeing - it seemed _that_ revolutionary, running an OS inside
| an OS on a desktop. I wonder whether VMware 's problem
| nowadays is that, having basically invented the technology,
| they've become almost synonymous with the category of
| virtualisation tech - kind of like "Hoover" for home
| appliances - and their other products get less attention.
|
| (I know that VMware didn't invent the idea of virtual
| machines. But my perception is that at that time, virtualised
| OSs were mostly found in mainframes.)
| anthk wrote:
| >VMware's problem nowadays is that, having basically
| invented the technology,
|
| IBM, actually, on mainframes.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I was running an x86 VM on my 16Mhz 68030 Mac LCII in 1996
| in college - SoftPC by Insignia Solutions.
| nwatson wrote:
| Yep, that's Broadcom's business model ... buy a business
| (VMWare), ignore its smaller customers, upsell the Fortune 500
| on the product (VMWare) to push out competing solutions, and
| keep the line items on those Fortune 500 bills growing. It's
| worked for them I guess. I left a Broadcom acquisition before
| the takeover.
| [deleted]
| devonkim wrote:
| It's kind of par for the entire enterprise market as a whole
| similar to the structural problems of b2b companies. SMBs are
| hard to serve effectively and the margins are slim, so you'll
| see companies that are b2b move more toward SMB b2b (see:
| Best Buy although Apple is the clear exception here).
| Everyone chases the big accounts because the model is less
| risky no different than how there's no shortage of luxury
| homes being built.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Why wouldn't you just post to the article directly, and bypass
| the horrible Reddit web site for the redirect?
| cruano wrote:
| Because the reddit post was also made by the author ? And
| he's responding to the comments there too?
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Fair enough.
| goodguyamercunt wrote:
| Install old reddit redirect on firefox
| infogulch wrote:
| It's so sad to see good integrated tech products being bought out
| just so the market can squeeze it and its customers dry of money,
| leaving nothing but a dry soulless husk of finance-driven
| leadership squeezing blood from desperate vendor-locked
| customers, just so swarms of consultants can move everyone that
| can afford them off onto the next integrated product to rinse and
| repeat.
|
| The current solution to business management feels suboptimal. If
| companies are like persons maybe they should be organized with a
| more integrated 'body', where the 'head' doesn't have total power
| to sell out the rest of the integrated parts for its own gain.
| Co-op like organizational structures might avoid this issue, for
| example.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| If they invested instead a mere Billion into optimizing a fork of
| e.g. QEMU they would destroy VMware in performance.
| mbreese wrote:
| This isn't about the hypervisor. This is about the enterprise
| sales. A bank isn't going to run their data center on qemu,
| regardless of the performance. They are going to go with the
| company that can sell them support contracts with dedicated
| engineers to answer the phone.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Yup as a former employee I can confirm this is not about the
| hypervisor although vmw has a good hypervisor, it's about
| everything auxiliary to that
| bluGill wrote:
| Big companies are starting to learn that free open source can
| be supported in house, in some cases it is even cheaper, but
| in others the flexibility of being in control of when a much
| needed by only you feature is developed is a big deal. Open
| source also is never acquired and the price jacked up to
| beyond the worth but they are forced to pay the price anyway
| because they can't get off before their license expires.
| sbarre wrote:
| > Big companies are starting to learn that free open source
| can be supported in house
|
| Sure but the problem here is can you find and retain the
| people who can do that work, if you are a big lumbering
| "un-interesting" company where tech is not your core focus?
| In most cases the answer is "no".
|
| There's a reason major software vendors provide
| professional services. If their customers could reliably
| hire and (most importantly) retain experts on their own,
| they wouldn't need professional services.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >There's a reason major software vendors provide
| professional services. If their customers could reliably
| hire and (most importantly) retain experts on their own,
| they wouldn't need professional services.
|
| This. As a tech person with _decades_ of professional
| services experience in the tech space, I couldn 't agree
| more.
|
| Generally, there are three reasons why corporate entities
| hire professional services (this isn't limited to tech
| stuff either):
|
| 1. There's a specific need for design/implementation
| expertise where FTEs are either not readily available or
| are unnecessary once the implementation is complete;
|
| 2. The internal group in favor of a particular
| technology/implementation wants/needs validation from
| "experts" to get full buy-in from management;
|
| 3. Professional services are brought in to "validate"
| existing project plans/implementation details as a CYA
| against project failure (e.g., "the consultants told us
| this was the way to go. _They_ were wrong, not us. ")
| which (both bringing in consultants _and_ project
| failure) happens a lot more often than you might think.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I work for a small company and they seem to have figured
| this out 20 years ago. I've been tasked with supporting the
| network and I've got to say that all the fancy (or not)
| proprietary firewalls all seem like a pick your own poison
| of cost/support issues, and they all go end of life
| eventually but the network needs to keep running. We also
| use PFSense in a few places and I think the feeling among
| the operations team (2.5 of us) is that we'd like to just
| use that in future.
| BVCommander wrote:
| I use PFSense and Snort at home and it's perfectly fine
| for the price I paid for it, but enterprise grade it
| ain't. I wouldn't use it to protect a network worth more
| than my beer budget.
|
| I don't know what business you're in and maybe after a
| nightly tape backup there's nothing important for you to
| lose. Frankly that's most small businesses. But if you've
| got real trade secrets get a proper IDS/IPS before you
| regret it.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Sure, the networking thing is a part time job for all of
| us, and there's even been some talk of bringing in
| professional services to look over it a bit. But my
| question is, what would we get? The whole IDS/IPS/WAF
| industry seems pretty much dripping in snakeoil. It seems
| like Cisco was once the king, but has lost a lot of
| respect. Palo Alto seems to be the current fashion but
| unless you have a serious alcohol problem, it's going to
| exceed your beer budget. I worked with Imperva and Alert
| Logic back in the day and no one ever seemed too
| impressed with them. Then there's SonicWall which seems
| reviled and Fortigate which seems like the reasonable
| budget option. I'm sure there's tons others I'm not even
| aware of.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > They are going to go with the company that can sell them
| support contracts with dedicated engineers to answer the
| phone.
|
| There's no reason the company selling them support couldn't
| be providing support for QEMU btw. If it met their needs
| otherwise I'm sure they'd consider it.
| perlgeek wrote:
| It's not merely about the performance, it's about the
| management layer on top, support contracts, enterprise sales
| etc.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| right but they wouldn't be able to own qemu. that's what they
| want
| mkl wrote:
| At the cost of giving away their billion dollars of R&D to
| their competition - QEMU is GPL licensed.
| sleepydog wrote:
| It works both ways --- they get their competitors' R&D too.
|
| Plenty of companies seem to be OK with using GPL2-licensed
| Linux, why wouldn't qemu be the same?
| AcerbicZero wrote:
| I was hoping an independent VMware might recapture some of what
| it lost during the Dell years, but they still produce a solid
| product that I generally enjoy working with. Not sure if Broadcom
| is going to make the situation much better though.
| unabridged wrote:
| Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any
| company ran by <40 yr olds ever paying $100k+ a year to VMWare,
| Symantec, Oracle, ...
|
| To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from
| having to deal with Linux directly
| burnte wrote:
| > To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from
| having to deal with Linux directly
|
| New companies, too. There's a lot to be said for paying someone
| to make problems go away. Not everyone wants to write their own
| software or change their own oil.
| cmckn wrote:
| Throwing money at a problem is an easy thing to do, if you've
| got the money. Lock-in sucks, but having someone to blame
| doesn't.
|
| A friend uses VMWare in an IT role at a medium sized company.
| They don't have a software engineering team, just a bunch of
| users and an IT skeleton crew; so it makes sense for them.
| bonzini wrote:
| Hire one person less and you've already broken even. Applies
| just the same to to any managed service on the cloud, to
| Outlook365 instead of your own email server, etc.
| scarface74 wrote:
| And when you outsource it - you make finding that next one
| person someone else's problem. I've had to hire that "one
| person" before. It's a pain. And while we were looking for
| that one person, I had to juggle my day job (software
| development) with net ops.
|
| Yes I know how to do app dev + cloud Net ops, it's kind of my
| thing.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep
| from having to deal with Linux directly_ "
|
| You can see people spending millions of dollars a year to keep
| from having to deal with Linux as evidence that they are
| stupid. Or you can see it as evidence that Linux really is that
| bad. It works both ways.
|
| VMware gives you a thing people can be trained on and certified
| on, a brand you can hire for and screen resumes on, a
| consistent environment which behaves in a predictable way that
| you really can turn employees into replacable cogs. Any
| helpdesk or admin employee can deal with VMware, any MSP, any
| tech recruiter, and a lot of training companies. You can get
| backup systems which "support VMware" and storage which
| integrates with VMware snapshots, and reporting tools which
| work with VMware.
|
| It's almost not about the tech at all, it's about how do you
| build companies on shifting sands? You define interfaces for
| components which can be plugged together. "VMware" is an API or
| interface that the business can work to; vendors can say
| "deploy this OVF to VMware", sales can say to the business
| "this thing we need works with VMware" or to the customers "we
| can work with your VMware" or "our offering is trustworthy
| because we use VMware" and the customer recognises the name. HR
| can say "we need to hire people who know VMware" and that means
| something fairly specific to the wider world. "runs on Linux"
| and "people who know Linux" are wildly, wildly, variable and
| vague things which could mean "ran a website, minimum wage" or
| "turns SELinux off to make things run" or "was SRE for FAANG"
| or "did a PHD in AI for tuning networking stacks in HPC
| applications but doesn't know anything else".
|
| You make software by defining interfaces and components that
| can be plugged together to make larger systems. Brands are
| that, for tech. Like you hire someone who "knows React" not
| someone who "is a programmer" because that's too vague and is
| as likely to get you someone who worked on a Java CRUD program
| or someone who worked on a Python log analyser. Like you hire a
| "service delivery manager" or a "customer account manager" and
| not "an employee".
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| There is a whole world outside of silicon valley, crypto, and
| HN startups. There are huge companies that don't care a fart
| about open source, the newest buzzwords, or it's go/rust/java
| or c++. They want something they can get a full solutions from
| and that is companies like vmware, oracle, IBM, Dell. They want
| support from those corps when things fail and it's costing them
| millions of dollars per hour when the system breaks.
| unixhero wrote:
| The fat bosses above me get more cred by buying something
| expensive and ha ing everything outsourced, than doing
| something brilliant and inventing the future. This is the
| reason for it. I'm this way the fat bosses are left alone and
| can go home to their families, go on holidays, cabins and
| whatnot with not a gram of risk and uncertainty.
| jnovek wrote:
| Presuming for a moment that you're under 40 for the sake of
| conversation:
|
| Have you ever considered the other way around? That is, "What
| changes with age that would make someone over 40 prefer
| outsourcing a problem to an enterprise?"
|
| It's possible that this trend is a result of a different
| perspective.
| ghaff wrote:
| Certainly part of it is that, as you have been around longer
| and maybe moved higher up, you probably better appreciate how
| expensive it really is to have "just" a small team doing
| something that could largely be outsourced. You have the
| developers of course, their benefits, their manager's salary
| and benefits and some small slice of attention up the
| management chain and across other functional groups like HR.
| And it's just one more distraction from the things that
| actually matter to running the business.
| jnovek wrote:
| Everything in this conversation is dancing around the same
| thing: core competency.
|
| Something I saw in action building a startup is that the
| fewer people you have on your team, the more efficient they
| are.
|
| As you grow, it's wise to focus your headcount on your core
| competency and outsource everything else so that you are
| committing the organizational expense of more employees to
| all and only what you need as a business.
|
| Of course, enterprise stuff is not all roses. You still
| have to have someone with product expertise. There's vendor
| lock-in. Enterprise software is often oversold. Etc etc.
|
| There is no panacea, just stuff that works better in
| different situations.
| ProAm wrote:
| One thing you are paying for is maturity (in both software and
| the engineers) and predictable behavior. When you need to run a
| business sometimes (almost all the time) it's easier to pay
| people to get out of your way so you can execute. Execution is
| everything in running a successful and profitable business.
| Don't be penny foolish.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Legacy. Interoperability with other similar companies. Manpower
| requirements (far easier to onboard a junior developer with
| boring technologies)
| vinyl7 wrote:
| It's a big plus in the corporate world to be able to outsource
| support. It's worth it for companies to pay VMWare, Microsoft,
| etc. larges sums of money for support contracts so they have
| someone to call when things break. While Microsoft sells
| Windows Server, they also try really hard to add on support
| contracts with it. Paying several thousand dollars a year for a
| support contract is probably cheaper than paying
| salary+benefits for someone within the company to maintain it,
| and you get the facade of talking directly to people who know
| the product inside and out
| silvestrov wrote:
| Sometimes for me it seems like they pay to "get the facade of
| talking directly to people in suits" rather than having to
| deal with technies.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it seems like they pay to "get the facade of talking
| directly to people in suits" rather than having to deal
| with technies_
|
| Broadly speaking, anyone generalising the world into suits
| and techies needs a translation layer between them and
| anyone else.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You should always outsource any part of your business that is
| not part of your core competency and doesn't give you a
| competitive advantage - ie "the undifferentiated heavy
| lifting".
|
| I worked at companies as a software developer from 1996 - 2012
| that _had_ to manage their own infrastructure. But today, the
| only company that I worked for back then that would be managing
| their own infrastructure today is the one that has mainframes
| and hardware that handle the backends for lottery systems
| across the US.
|
| By 2012, there was a slow shift to the cloud.
|
| I first was exposed to how large enterprises worked in 2017. I
| was hired to lead two green field implementations. But at the
| last minute they decided to "move to the cloud" neither they
| nor I knew anything about the cloud. They hired consultants and
| a Managed Service Provider. Of course the internal IT
| department was vigilantly defending their turf and the
| "consultants" were old school Netops folks who only knew how to
| "lift and shift" and duplicate an on prem infrastructure and
| all of the red tape to the cloud and of course it was more
| expensive than just using a colo.
|
| I spent the next six months after the decision was made
| studying AWS and getting a certification not because I value
| certifications (I don't). But it gave me a guided learning path
| to know what I didn't know. It did open my eyes to what I
| wanted to do - work with companies - specifically developers
| and operations to show them how to actually take advantage of
| cloud and not just do lift and shifts - ie true "Devops".
|
| I left that company and went to a small startup for two years
| where I learned everything I know about "cloud application
| modernization" and then ended up in Professional Services at
| AWS.
|
| Until I started working with large enterprises and government
| organizations from the consulting side, I never appreciated the
| concerns of large enterprises and how they aren't in the "tech"
| business and it does make sense to outsource that knowledge -
| not to ProServe we don't do that type of work - to external
| partners.
|
| As far as VMWare, as silly as it sounds on the surface.
| Companies actually use VMWare to manage hybrid infrastructure
| on the cloud and on prem as a "single pane of glass".
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/
|
| I personally don't deal with those implementations. I stick
| with app dev.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| Newer companies don't deal with Linux directly either. The vast
| majority use managed cloud services (kubernetes, containers,
| serverless, managed databases, etc.). For all practical
| purposes - most of the start-up players use "enterprise
| software" as well. It's just different enterprises.
| numlocked wrote:
| I am the 37 year old CTO and co-founder of a company that pays
| VMWare something like that per year because we need an endpoint
| management solution. We have a strong engineering team but that
| certainly isn't something we are going to build ourselves.
| VMWare is not just virtualization.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| whats an ,,endpoint management solution"
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| They are almost certainly talking about Airwatch, which is
| a mobile device management solution (allows an employer to
| set restrictions on BYoD endpoints.) It might be a
| reference to Carbon Black, which is kind of like an
| antivirus client with some forensics capabilities added in.
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| usually cell and mobile device but can also include
| computers. Being able to push out software, policy updates,
| provisioning and remote wiping of devices.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Access control/management for corporate networks and
| networked resources.
| buro9 wrote:
| Compliance based stuff... "do you trust this machine to
| access your network/services/applications and execute these
| commands?"
|
| https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/endpoint-
| secur...
|
| (the VMWare owned product isn't CrowdStrike, that just had
| the best SEO page with a clear description. VMWare have
| Carbon Black which is the other dominant player in this
| market https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/whats-new/carbon-
| black.ht... )
| sbf501 wrote:
| That's really interesting. So a company would hire
| Crowdstrike/VMWare, and say "here's all these endpoints,
| make sure they are secure"? And then CS/VM would provide
| the service to manage the assets and their connectivity?
| Ka-ching. I would not want to spin up an IT team to do
| all of this if I could hire some experts with
| concentrated knowledge.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| Hit the nail on the head. It's a bit more than that
| realistically.
|
| I work for CrowdStrike just so any potential bias is out
| there in the open, but do not speak for them.
| throwaway19423 wrote:
| I'm in a senior position but not CEO. I'd pay VMware for
| virtualization as it just works compared to the complexity of
| opensource solutions. For endpoint mgmt, I'm curious about
| your use case? Is it about managing virtual endpoints in the
| cloud, on-prem servers (physical or virtual) or are you
| talking about laptops/workstations?
| numlocked wrote:
| Laptops and workstations. We use Workspace ONE.
| jhickok wrote:
| VMware purchased Airwatch, perhaps the premiere mobile
| device management suite.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Grove.co is a great example because it is totally not a
| software company. Is your role as CTO primarily the ERP &
| storefront, or just one or the other? I'm not following what
| you mean by endpoint (other than "storefront" because ERP
| would all be a SaaS right?)
| t3rabytes wrote:
| endpoint being employee devices, probably (via vmware's
| workspace one product)
| numlocked wrote:
| Storefront. We have our own headless e-commerce platform,
| with iOS, Android, and Web clients. We also have our own
| order management system that mediates between storefront
| and our ERP (which is commercial SaaS). And a handful of
| other smaller applications for everything from outbound
| carrier rate card testing, to customer service tooling &
| automation (integrated with ZenDesk) and all sorts of other
| bits and bobs like ETL code, integration layers, marketing
| tools, etc, etc. We should not have quite this much custom
| software, but it takes time to migrate the non-strategic
| sub-systems to commercial solutions -- and even then you'd
| be surprised how much custom software we DO actually need
| in a business like this.
|
| My role also encompasses many "CIO-like" functions, but my
| area of expertise is in application development and I look
| to hire strong leaders in the other areas (or move certain
| tech domains entirely into other functions -- eg our
| warehouse management system lives within our operations
| group, and me and my team help in an advisory capacity but
| don't "own" the budget or WMS strategy).
| unabridged wrote:
| It may be my pure naivety about management software, but I
| assume it just consists of spreadsheets, forms, secure login,
| data storage, and simple queries. I cannot imagine anything
| with this combination that couldn't be implemented in Google
| Sheets (and workspaces, and a handful of other google cloud
| apis) for at most $20 a month per user.
| mrweasel wrote:
| We did the math at my previous employer. The cost of running
| OpenStack, in terms of training and day to day operations was
| higher than just paying VMware their licens fee. We even had a
| guy from RedHat help us do the cost analysis, didn't matter,
| cheaper to just pay VMware. This didn't even include the cost
| of doing the migration.
|
| I can't imagine it being cheaper to build everything yourself
| on top of just plain KVM, or even LXC.
| jve wrote:
| Working in a Data Center, we provide various services,
| including Dedicated Cloud and Shared Cloud. We also evaluated
| OpenStack years ago... yes, we came to the same conclusion
| and just use VMWare.
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| Also factor in the people trained to use VMware. There is
| always a pool of individuals to hire.
| eatYourFood wrote:
| sleepdreamy wrote:
| As someone who works in the MSP space, Enterprise basically
| runs this country from a business perspective. I'm not even
| kidding.
|
| Microsoft has a monopoly on Corporate Domains/OS as it is.
| ghc wrote:
| Just for a second, imagine a company that _isn 't_ a software
| company, but needs software to run its business. Think
| manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food
| (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a
| lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all
| of them.
|
| Those companies run all their boring, essential software
| (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Since
| software isn't their core business, they pay an external
| company to keep their software running. Like it or not, cloud
| providers are for software companies, and most companies have
| no interest in becoming a software company. They might have
| some small groups that do analytics or software in-house, and
| those groups might use cloud providers, but all the _essential_
| software will be run by a company you can call when something
| breaks, or if you 're big enough embeds some staff in your
| office.
|
| It's just good sense to outsource non-core functions. Software
| companies outsource hosting and datacenter stuff to AWS, etc.
| Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
| nimbius wrote:
| but thats just it, this argument only ever works if you dont
| care about performance or features and believe the marketing.
| You make eggs, and your target fixation only allows you to
| see eggs, so these companies hold some mysterious value to
| you.
|
| KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and
| handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without
| additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory minimums
| for hardware support on network switches and servers. Cockpit
| makes it dead simple to run.
|
| Oracle performance is so awful the license terms do not allow
| you to release performance benchmarks or comparative analysis
| against other databases. it also has all the same heavy
| lifting you need to focus on for things like galera clusters
| or postgres, so theres no clear win unless you like paying
| Larry for the privilege of slow transactionals on a
| hyperconverged iron beast, or youre too lazy to figure out
| ODBC.
|
| And Symantec so openly hates their customers they now bundle
| a cryptominer with their software. before that their
| incompetence was so blinding Google had to step in and force
| them to give up their CA business.
|
| "enterprise" software is an absurd proposition for anyone
| smart enough to realize their business is more than just the
| end product. to everyone else, these companies are borderline
| predatory.
| amenod wrote:
| I agree with you - and you are still missing the point. The
| enterprises are buying a service. They don't care that it
| is running on AHWRGGG instead of TLMWBBB (which is soooo
| much better). What they care about is that it runs, and
| when it doesn't, that someone fixes it. This is it. Could
| you run everything on PostgreSQL instead of Oracle? Yes,
| take a look at EnterpriseDB. I guess Oracle just sells
| better? (guessing here, no idea)
|
| The money is of course important, but these providers are
| smart. They take only what they can and not more. Which is
| still big money. And while Oracle & co. would never make it
| into any company I can make a decision for, I don't think
| that keeps them awake at night - there are enough (big!)
| fish in the ocean.
| fragmede wrote:
| You could run everything on Xen instead of VMware, except
| as you point out - you can't really. Oracle is similarly
| positioned. Their database software is just one piece of
| a much larger ecosystem of products. An "enterprise
| solution", if you will. Oracle actually competes with
| VMware in the broader enterprise space.
| treesknees wrote:
| > KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare
|
| Do you have any sources for this? I worked at a company
| developing NFV appliances, we always had much higher
| network throughput on VMware than we did using KVM without
| using some type of convoluted vswitch alternative or PCI
| passthrough.
|
| VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of
| VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD,
| delegate different permissions and roles to users/groups,
| manage upgrades, interact with PowerShell and other APIs,
| it has integration into Dell and Cisco solutions, all sorts
| of additional features you won't find running CentOS and
| KVM without adding more 3rd party software on top and
| cobbling it together.
| gregmac wrote:
| > VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire
| ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie
| it into AD, delegate different permissions and roles to
| users/groups, manage upgrades, interact with PowerShell
| and other APIs, it has integration into Dell and Cisco
| solutions, all sorts of additional features you won't
| find running CentOS and KVM without adding more 3rd party
| software on top and cobbling it together.
|
| This is it, really. For big companies this kind of stuff
| is important.
|
| And "cobbling it together" is very much understating the
| effort involved to keep it running: eventually you'll
| upgrade one of the components and it will break
| something, because you didn't read the release notes of
| an upstream dependency that mentioned a breaking change
| that affects your particular setup.
|
| Having the vendor (vmware) provide this as a delivered,
| tested, supported solution is _so_ much easier.
|
| Similarly, I suspect it would be significantly simpler to
| find IT firms and/or hire individuals with VMware
| knowledge than it would be to find the equivalent on KVM
| + Cockpit + the dozen other components you need.
|
| Note: I'm not saying this is right or the way things
| _should_ be, but simply pointing out the "enterprise"
| perspective. Boring technology is safe.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Same. VMware leagues better than the various horrible
| Openstack deployments some customers want to use.
|
| I have in depth knowledge of kvm and the issue isn't kvm
| it's everything else.
| nimbius wrote:
| colour me unimpressed. VMWare cheerleaders haul out
| openstack as their touchstone example of how hard VM's
| are in linux but forget that VMWare pales in comparison
| to what Openstack is, which is an entire full-stack cloud
| hosting provider with accounting, DNS, tenant metering
| and network delegation, and support for k8s.
|
| Start comparing VMWare against Proxmox, which is an out
| of the box solution anyone can use and includes every
| single feature of ESX and many vsphere features youd
| easily lose your shirt for. https://www.proxmox.com/en/
|
| heres an independent performance test. KVM is easily
| faster than ESX.
|
| https://www.spec.org/virt_sc2013/
| scarface74 wrote:
| You don't grok "the enterprise". Any CTO of a large
| company would feel much better about having VMWare behind
| them and their ecosystem than your proposed solution.
|
| "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" applies equally to
| big enterprise SaaS providers and companies like Oracle,
| Microsoft, VMWare, Salesforce, etc.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| I learned this lesson in an interview once. I was bullish
| on sap pricing and the cost of consultants. The person
| from top management, multi-billion chemical, said "you
| think we have no money"? They did, 2 years later they've
| opened a brand new building to fit a 1000 of those
| consultants.
| mbreese wrote:
| _> if you dont care about performance or features _
|
| Bingo! If you are a manufacturing company, you care about
| two things:
|
| 1) does this software do the job I need?
|
| 2) does this software cost less than the value I get out of
| using it?
|
| If the answer is "yes and yes" then -- congratulations! you
| made a sale!
|
| Sure, if some other company comes in and says "hey, I can
| do the same job, but cheaper," the customer would listen.
| But so long as the software works _good enough_ , then the
| externalities of support contracts, billing, "enterprisey-
| stuff" may matter more than features or performance.
| ghaff wrote:
| >if you dont care about performance or features and believe
| the marketing
|
| I don't except to the degree that the product is more or
| less suitable for my business needs. And note I said
| product, which KVM by itself is not. If I'm going to use
| KVM--and, yes, I likely would rather than VMware unless I
| otherwise needed VMware for some reason--I'd be buying it
| as part of a supported commercial Linux distribution.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Would you suggest that all companies write their own office
| suites? Manage their own SSO solutions? Manage their own
| mail servers? Manage their own expense system (Concur)?
| Manage their own payroll (ADP)? Every small company manage
| their own benefits (Insperity)? Do whatever Workday does?
|
| The health care organizations overwhelmingly use third
| party EHR/EMR systems and schools use third party companies
| for enrollment (Blackboard).
|
| It doesn't make sense to bring any those in house.
| eatYourFood wrote:
| lulwut?
|
| I've got several clients that pay over 500k/year to a SaaS
| ERP vendor. The ERP system is the very definition of
| enterprise software.
|
| What would you suggest I advise my clients when it comes to
| their finance, inventory, order management, logistics etc?
|
| I guess they could piece together various SaaS solutions to
| create some sort of composable microservice based system to
| meet their needs but that's a massive engineering overhead
| when they can just get all of the functionality they need
| on one big fat enterprise ERP system.
|
| The cosmetics manufacturer I work with does not care about
| what the technologists (people like you and me) care about.
| They just want to run their manufacturing and wholesale
| operation and if Oracle are offering one system that does
| it all, why wouldn't they take that deal?
| rconti wrote:
| No, it only ever works if you care about your core
| competencies more than performance or features of the
| software products you run your business on.
|
| Remember, not only are most non-software companies better
| at their business than they are at software, they're also
| not hiring from the same tech talent pool, they're not
| paying their tech people as much, they're not letting the
| tech run their business.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness, like AWS. This
| is how I feel about most B2B companies and software. I wonder
| how a recession and the end of free funny money will change
| that whole sector?
| xbar wrote:
| Small companies will fail and vanish. Large companies will
| layoff employees and reinvest in technology to leverage the
| ones that remain. B2B software companies would do well to
| retain existing developers and grow their teams if possible
| to meet scaling demand and cover feature gaps in existing
| product lines as part of normal business.
|
| One part of the dynamic, simplified: big companies can show
| quickest cost savings by laying off employees; this
| satisfies anxious shareholders during the bumpy times by
| suggesting that management is wiling to make "hard
| decisions." Such companies cannot quickly re-tool their
| technology stacks nor renegotiate 3-year software
| contracts. B2B companies tend to do very well as long as
| they are not solely focused on their startup/growth/pre-IPO
| customers, who get hit hard.
|
| Here are some arguments for post-downturn tech growth: 1981
| and the use of the PC + Lotus/WordPerfect/BASIC for
| efficient local compute 1990 and the surge of the LAN to
| replace centralized IT 2001 and the swell of SaaS 2008 and
| the swell of cloud 2022 and the .....
| rootusrootus wrote:
| If you're right, then this looks like a great opportunity
| to outcompete these dumb, lazy companies that don't know
| how to run a business.
| jjice wrote:
| > Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness
|
| I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to
| cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot
| of time and still mess it up.
|
| I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I
| could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a
| good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up.
|
| If these (and the endless examples of paying professionals)
| are a tax for stupidity and laziness, then everyone is lazy
| and stupid. If you're not a software company, there's a
| good chance it's worth it to save the time to pay someone
| to set it up for you. Also, if Joe's Fish Market wants a
| POS system and needs a server for it and he decides to set
| it up himself, if he gets it up and running, what are the
| chances it'll stay up to day and not have a firewall issue?
| Probably pretty low compared to if a professional did it.
|
| Joe wants to focus on selling fish. That's where he's a
| pro. I don't know anything about fish, but I could set up a
| server for him. We all have our own skills, and it's often
| worth while to leverage other people's skills, because
| they'll do it faster, better, and it will likely end up
| cheaper after time and security are taken into
| consideration.
| yobbo wrote:
| > I pay a barber to cut my hair.
|
| Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless
| analogies:
|
| Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you
| need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to
| cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that
| prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant.
|
| You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever
| own a car when you can rent a car whenever you need one.
|
| You pay a barber to cut your hair? Why not just wear a
| wig!
|
| And so on ...
| depaya wrote:
| There are other good replies to you, but one other thing
| I'll add: for a lot of companies it is much much easier
| to pay a steady $xxx/month than it is to pay a large
| amount up front and budget for unknown variable costs
| down the road.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Actually, I seriously have been thinking about not owning
| a car ever again. We are the typical two car family. But
| I went a year without a car and I still go weeks on end
| without a car when my son needs it.
|
| Uber is actually cheaper for me than a car + insurance +
| maintenance. I work from home. I'm going to give my car
| to my son when we move.
|
| When I need to see my parents 200 miles away, I can hop
| on a small plane for $300 round trip and just work from
| there for a week.
| jnovek wrote:
| I lease a car every four years in part so that I don't
| have to deal with the inevitable car repairs that come
| after that point.
|
| For some -- but not all -- people, that's a preferable
| option.
|
| For some -- but not all -- companies, enterprise tech is
| a preferable option.
| yencabulator wrote:
| I typically own cars 4-10 years old. I'm currently still
| happy with a 2008 model that has had exactly one non-
| maintenance, non-upgrade, cost -- which wouldn't even
| have prevented using it in any way, I just like the
| emissions system to be as eco-friendly as it can.
|
| "Inevitable repairs after 4 years" is just a delusion,
| and silly.
|
| Might I suggest you be honest with yourself and say you
| like the new car feel? Maybe even like it as a status
| symbol? Don't want to think about what tires to buy to
| replace worn-out ones?
|
| I'm the opposite. I like having a scuffed-up car (or in
| this case, jeep), with dogs climbing all over the seats
| and sand everywhere from going off road. I'd rather use
| the thing and have fun on the trip.
|
| Even if I drove my jeep off a cliff, called it a total
| loss, and got nothing back from insurance, I'd lose less
| money than you lost in 3 years of leasing -- and I've
| already had the thing longer than that.
| jnovek wrote:
| "Might I suggest you be honest with yourself and say you
| like the new car feel? Maybe even like it as a status
| symbol? Don't want to think about what tires to buy to
| replace worn-out ones?"
|
| Dead wrong.
|
| I lease the cheapest car that is practical for my
| situation. I consider cars completely utilitarian tools.
| I get no joy from them, I hate driving and take public
| transit whenever I can.
|
| I had very little money until I was in my late 20s when
| my career prospects finally took off. Cheap cars that
| failed frequently were a constant source of anxiety
| because I couldn't get far enough ahead to maintain
| savings. When my career improved and I could afford small
| luxuries, I spent the money on leasing because I wanted
| to avoid the anxiety of cars breaking down. It was a gift
| to myself to lower my stress level.
|
| EDIT: also, in northern Minnesota where the winters are
| hard and everything is covered in salt, car trouble DOES
| start after 4 years. Sometimes before.
| rconti wrote:
| Wow, you argued with the parent about their own
| priorities, and then proved their point anyway.
|
| Yes, they don't want to think about what tires to buy. Or
| whether it needs to be fixed or not. The fact that
| repairs are not in inevitability but a possibility is
| part of the point.
|
| The parent is making the point that they're rather throw
| money at the problem and not have to think about it, not
| that they've precisely run the numbers on all of the
| possibilities and decided their outcome is the most cost-
| effective.
| vel0city wrote:
| Why would you pay for municipal water supply? Just
| laziness. Put a well in instead and maintain it.
|
| And when putting in the well, why would you _pay_ someone
| else to dig it for you? Just laziness. Dig it yourself!
|
| And then when digging the well, why would you rent the
| drill? Just laziness, outsourcing the maintenance and
| ownership costs to someone else.
|
| And then why bother buying the drill at some market where
| they're then manufacturing the drill for you? Pure
| laziness. Just make the drill yourself!
|
| Or maybe, you just go with a trusted service instead of
| learning how to manufacture digging equipment when all
| you really want is running water.
| teh64 wrote:
| For the first two, there are definitely people how live
| like that, because of _surprise_ tech companies like Uber
| making it possible.
|
| Also literally everyone and every company relies on
| someone else to provide some services or hardware to
| enable people to do their job and live. Even this
| conversation could not even happen without other people
| making sure internet connections are kept stable. This
| whole "one person is an island" ideology is not something
| a lot of people subscribe to.
|
| Some companies don't want to spend time doing software
| things that are not core to their business, so they pay
| other companies which _sometimes_ do it better. Most
| definitely not always, but for some companies it would
| still be better than some in-house hodgepodge.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I mean, people do most of those things (the wig analogy
| is a bit off but people do get weeves and extensions) --
| not everyone, but I don't cook, as an example. I own a
| frying pan, but I don't know the last time I've ever used
| it. As a general rule, I don't cook.
|
| And many, many people don't own a car, not because they
| can't afford one but because it makes more sense to rent
| one or hire a car service when needed. Frankly, my dream
| scenario is to have enough money to hire a personal
| driver who is on-demand and at the ready when I need to
| go out and do things. For plenty of people, that's
| anathema. But for me, I don't like driving (or cooking)
| and I'd much rather pay someone to do it for me.
|
| The same is true for software. I like tinkering with a
| lot of my own software, but if I was building my own
| business, I sure as shit would rather pay for an
| established company to handle some of the grunt work,
| rather than hiring dedicated teams that in aggregate
| would cost a lot of money.
|
| The rise of SaaS and PaaS isn't just laziness. It's a
| recognition that for a lot of people, even developers,
| we'd rather entrust a lot of the operations and IT work
| to someone else.
| yobbo wrote:
| > The rise of SaaS and PaaS isn't just laziness.
|
| My point is that none of the analogies are arguments for
| (or against) SaaS, or in this case "brand name"
| enterprise software.
|
| Whenever any of these comically banal analogies are
| brought out to sell something, the intention always seems
| to be to suspend critical thinking.
|
| There exists many legitimate arguments, for many things.
| They never begin with "why would anyone need a frying
| pan".
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| Would you consider a chef who buys produce from the market
| as opposed to buying a farm and growing it on their own
| "stupid and lazy"?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| It's more like being a chef and paying another company to
| cut up your ingredients for you and cook them.
|
| Companies these days just want to specialize in making
| cool menu designs and marketing and waiting on the three
| star Michelin review to roll in somehow.
| simiones wrote:
| > It's more like being a chef and paying another company
| to cut up your ingredients for you and cook them.
|
| That would be like a Hypervisor company paying VMWare to
| re-distribute ESXi or something.
|
| But a farm company buying VMWare ESXi to run its IT infra
| instead of using, say, CentOS is exactly like a chef
| sourcing ingredients instead of growing them herself.
| teh64 wrote:
| That is not the same analogy, because a chef's job is to
| make food, but say a trucking companies job is not to
| create GPS and mapping software, or some HR tool which
| tracks sick days etc... The difference is what the core
| competency of the company is.
| nousermane wrote:
| Exactly. Most "enterprise" software competes with a team of 3
| doing it all in excel. At this rate, $100k/yr is a bargain.
| FredPret wrote:
| I do ERP and the thought of replicating it in Excel...
| yikes. For a big company you'll need a team of hundreds and
| a huge surplus of sanity, and you'll still have a worse
| outcome.
|
| An ERP is basically a database with an interface with
| business logic built in. Certainly not something you want
| to do in Excel.
| foobiekr wrote:
| When people talk enterprise they are talking 2000+ person
| companies. They are not doing their ERP payroll etc using
| excel.
| tnel77 wrote:
| Because Linux is fun! /s
| indymike wrote:
| > Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
|
| Um... perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to
| better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than
| burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual
| machines.
| adrr wrote:
| If you think there is efficiency gains in terms of cost
| savings. Why don't you do a startup to try to go after the
| enterprise software market? We spend millions on ERP, PLM,
| SCM,WMS, etc. We would gladly move to cheaper solutions
| that offered the same feature sets. I don't have choice
| about VMWare because a bunch of software requires on-prem
| hosting due to latency(need sub 10ms for sensors) and the
| software is built on top of windows.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > ... perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to
| better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than
| burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual
| machines.
|
| Over the years, I've come to suspect that maybe the
| technology is less of a differentiator in the overall
| effectiveness of a company's IT environment than the people
| running it.
|
| And with IT staffing supply having lagged behind demand (as
| also evidenced by relatively high salaries in IT vs many
| other professions), you could easily argue that it was
| (still is?) historically more difficult to hire good IT
| people than in many other professions.
|
| And arguably that's making outsourcing of IT needs
| relatively more attractive than outsourcing of other
| business functions where reasonably competent leadership
| and staffing is easier to come by.
|
| And arguably, capturing many of the benefits of Open Source
| require more IT competency than using off the shelf
| mainstream commercial software. If I'm using the same crap
| that everyone of my competitors is using, none of us win or
| lose on that. But when using Open Source, I'm more likely
| to depend on the quality of my IT leadership and staff to
| outcompete my competitors. And unless a CEO is quite IT
| literate, s/he probably doesn't want that additional
| headache of becoming good at figuring out how to hire good
| IT leadership.
|
| So I'd hazard a guess, that insourcing and the use of Open
| Source will become more attractive for many corporations
| only if/when IT salaries drop more in line with other
| professions.
| yobbo wrote:
| > but needs software to run its business
|
| In this case, they have no need for VMWare or Oracle.
|
| Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name"
| enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of
| careerists handcuff themselves to, which allows them to float
| through their careers fairly unchallenged.
|
| At one point in time, IBM had this market position. Then
| Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon and Google.
| hnarn wrote:
| > Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand
| name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of
| careerists handcuff themselves to
|
| Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make
| software solutions are often really big because their
| solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by
| far the most stable and reliable?
|
| If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying
| that businesses buying the Google Apps suite is
| nonsensical, because the only reason you'd ever use Google
| is because you're a "careerist" that "only know" Google.
|
| That's obviously not true, Gmail and the rest of the Google
| suite have been market-leading for many years, because they
| are good solutions that solve real problems. Presumably the
| same thing goes for the Microsoft Office suite, and so on.
| yobbo wrote:
| People are now starting careers as Office 365 "officers".
| From now until retirement, they will champion Office 365
| and its successors in all situations, because in effect
| they will be championing their own CVs.
|
| Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on.
|
| If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365
| makes no difference.
|
| The insight is that _the careerists_ are the effective
| insider salesmen of enterprise software. Not specs,
| benchmarks, stats or anything like that.
| hnarn wrote:
| Why can't multiple things be true at the same time?
|
| The idea of product "officers" can be bizarre and counter
| productive, while that product simultaneously can be one
| of the best in the market.
|
| I'm not saying that O365 is great, I use it at work and I
| hate it, but enterprise software has always been like
| this: it's not enough to be better, you need to be
| something like 3x better, but if you are it doesn't
| matter if you're going up against Microsoft. Software is
| a lot more competitive in that way than a lot of other
| industries.
| yobbo wrote:
| The pain occurs because of the symbiosis between
| technical lock-in and careerists.
|
| If a tech company has achieved both technical and
| organizational lock-in (or maybe "capture"), specs don't
| matter.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It doesn't matter if Google Apps itself is superior.
| Google is not exactly known for its enterprise support.
| You also can't count on the long term focus of Google.
| You know when you buy into the MS ecosystem you are going
| to get great enterprise support, they don't have the
| attention span of a crack addled flea like Google does,
| it's going to integrate well with the rest of their
| products, you get deep discounts from bundling.
|
| Specs and benchmarks only matter to geeks.
| amenod wrote:
| Gmail is a market leader only because it is good enough
| (and at the start it was even better than competition)
| and because it was _free_ - and still is for some cases.
| Can 't comment on Google Apps, never used them.
|
| Otherwise, I'm not sure I would put Google in the mix
| with Oracle / MS and others. They are firmly non-
| enterprise, in that it is notoriously difficult to get
| any support from them, even if you are paying (there are
| exceptions, yadda yadda...). With Oracle, their products
| may suck (and they do), but the company knows to answer
| the phone for their customers, otherwise they won't be
| able to sell that beefy contract in a few months' time.
|
| > Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make
| software solutions are often really big because their
| solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by
| far the most stable and reliable?
|
| Oracle? Lol.
| vel0city wrote:
| > Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them.
|
| > They are firmly non-enterprise
|
| So you acknowledge you don't really have knowledge of the
| _core_ enterprise suite Google sells to enterprises, but
| at the same time you 're certain they're non-enterprise?
|
| Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps) is
| _absolutely_ enterprise. They definitely have enterprise
| support contracts, and the few times I 've had issues
| _while having a support contract_ they have been easy to
| work with.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > Google Workspace (the _new-ish_ name for Google Apps.
|
| You hit the nail on the head why enterprises stay away
| from Google. They are going to lose focus on it as soon
| as no one internally can justify maintaining it to
| enhance their careers and show "scope" and "impact".
| vel0city wrote:
| They've been selling Google Workspace for 16 years. Its
| one of the biggest MDM platforms out there. ~~There are
| over 2 _billion_ users of this paid enterprise suite.~~
| Guess I was wrong on that figure, >2 billion users with
| >6 million paid subscriptions.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Those are non paid users
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-
| move...
|
| > As of March 2020, there were 6 million paid customers,
| according to Google's most recent publicly available
| stats.
| vel0city wrote:
| Ah, I misread their announcements.
|
| There's still supposedly over 2 _billion_ users of these
| services. Its not a small project with a niche client set
| where absolutely nobody pays. Reader was popular, but not
| 2 billion users popular. How many people do you think
| really used Allo? Its really not in the same space as the
| many products they 've killed.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It matters because Microsoft uses its much larger
| _paying_ installed based to support a slew of first party
| and third party companies to provide "enterprise
| support". They have hundreds of people in sales that
| report back to MS what large enterprises want.
|
| People on HN don't grok "the enterprise".
|
| I mentioned in another post, that even though I work for
| $BigTech, I work in the cloud enterprise consulting space
| (not Azure). Dealing with the enterprise is a completely
| different beast than dealing with other tech companies.
| Microsoft has almost four decades of experience in the
| space.
|
| Even on the personal side, I would much rather deal with
| MS for my one lonely 5 person Office365 subscription than
| Google support.
| hnarn wrote:
| I don't have direct experience with administrating
| Oracle, but my impression is that they make a lot of
| money from the moats they've built: but they would never
| have been able to build them if the product was garbage
| to begin with. Sure, nobody would probably pick Oracle
| today for a new project almost regardless of size, but
| surely there must have been a point in time when Oracle
| was simply superior when it came to stability and
| functionality? If not, their current size really makes no
| sense, because you can't build a business on scamming
| people in the long run.
| tetha wrote:
| 5 - 10 years back, Oracle was very far ahead of the
| database game and there was no practical competitor
| regarding performance, query optimization, storage
| management and enterprisey management features. For quite
| some time, if you needed a large central relational store
| for a business, Oracle was the only answer.
|
| The main change is that MariaDB and PostgreSQL have
| caught up a lot of ground over the last years, so
| OracleDB has been losing the edge they have been paid
| for.
| yobbo wrote:
| > because you can't build a business on scamming people
| in the long run.
|
| When switching is effectively impossible, this is what
| happens.
|
| Oracle has been buying various application companies with
| installed bases that are difficult to migrate away from.
| They are essentially buying customers to milk after
| putting in their enclosed pasture.
| parasubvert wrote:
| Switching isn't impossible, there are plenty of companies
| that help you get off Oracle. It's just that it's risky
| and time consuming, requires specialized knowledge, and
| companies would rather pay up than deal with all of those
| things. But this goes for almost any complex product on
| the planet. Switching costs are high,
| scarface74 wrote:
| Gmail in no shape form or fashion a "market leader" in
| the enterprise.
| unabridged wrote:
| Nontech companies are only using spreadsheets, forms, and
| storage. But they spend their technical manpower on
| implementing business logic in closed source locked-in
| expensive software. I don't think its much more work just to
| implement the business logic in excel/google sheets and
| serverless functions, and end up with something much much
| cheaper and much more portable.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
|
| Not just Linux but IT in general. It may have to be about
| security; my impression is that at least some of the
| widespread successful attacks in recent years might have been
| prevented if non IT companies had their own IT department,
| servers and in house security teams. Relying on an external
| provider is cheap and comfortable, until the day a single
| vulnerability screws all its customers data in a single day.
| mfer wrote:
| Having your own It department doesn't mean you'll be fine
| for security. Plenty of health systems have their own IT
| department and have been hit.
|
| But, even thinking of health care systems is thinking of
| big businesses. How does a road construction company
| justify an IT department or security team? Think of
| businesses like that. They have have an IT guy who manages
| services they use and is an expert at using those.
|
| Most businesses are small to medium in size and non-tech.
| hnarn wrote:
| > if non IT companies had their own IT department
|
| I think you vastly underestimate the cost of on-prem IT,
| especially for small and medium sized businesses. The
| "floor" cost of your own IT is many, many orders of
| magnitude higher than a subscription to something like
| Office 365 for something like 50 people.
|
| "Normal" people don't use cloud services because they're
| lazy, they do it because the economics of rolling your own
| IT does not make sense, and hasn't since the days when it
| stopped being your only option.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I work in this area and it's the opposite.
|
| Small businesses with in house It get hacked waaaaasy more.
| ghaff wrote:
| Whether or not those specific companies are good deals absent
| legacy requirements, how many engineers can you hire for that
| $100K+ to DIY? And how are you going to convince your auditors
| that you're taking appropriate steps to mitigate your risk?
| Companies broadly need to make build vs. buy decisions about a
| _lot_ of things and they should generally be pretty selective
| about what they build.
| [deleted]
| geodel wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of companies which are raising world's
| consciousness wouldn't buy the grubby enterprise software.
| rr808 wrote:
| I work for a regular corp. We have a lot of servers, our annual
| hardware bill is 8 figures (just for our single project), more
| than our developer's wages. 100k is a drop.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Not sure I understand the expected synergies here. Broadcom's
| main business is making embedded chips for networking and storage
| devices. Is this just a pure diversification play?
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| yes consider Broadcom bought Symantec.
| dralley wrote:
| >Is this just a pure diversification play?
|
| Probably. 6 months ago they were looking at acquiring SAS
| (which didn't go anywhere). The core competencies for that of
| those companies are even less related to what Broadcom does.
| martypitt wrote:
| I wonder if this will have knock-on repercussions into the JVM
| stack, since VMWare owns Pivotal, and Pivotal create Spring.
| ulkesh wrote:
| Yeah this has me a little concerned, but only a little at this
| time. The only reason I'm not feeling any major anxiety yet is
| due to the ubiquity of Spring libraries/frameworks/products.
| They're everywhere used by thousands of companies, so it would
| be unlikely that this acquisition would have any dramatic
| changes for Spring. Perhaps a change in ownership or governance
| will occur, but hopefully there will be little or no impact.
| mysterydip wrote:
| "to speed up its expansion into the enterprise software
| business."
|
| Why does a chipmaker want/need to expand into enterprise
| software? Shouldn't they be expanding to making different chips?
| mbesto wrote:
| Why not both? There's no reason _NOT_ to get into enterprise
| software. You have hundreds of sales people selling chipsets to
| enterprise and you 're telling me it would be dumb not to have
| them increase their attach rate?
| AlphaSite wrote:
| Tens of thousands of sales people.
| nwatson wrote:
| In 2021 Broadcom semiconductor revenue was $18.8B out of $27.5
| billion. Broadcom has a large portfolio of enterprise software
| offerings.
|
| The web page for their software offerings is at
| https://software.broadcom.com/ . The interesting thing you'll
| notice is that they do not list any specific software they
| offer (e.g. Symantec for enterprise security, which by the way
| is separate from Norton now). Rather they sell you on their
| ability to deliver on four specific enterprise functional
| needs.
|
| They won't answer your call to buy their suite unless you're in
| the Fortune 500. They will try to sell you on their whole
| suite. They will upsell you on any new acquisition, eg VMWare.
|
| They might renew my personal VMWare Fusion license for another
| year but would probably close that down soon for not being
| core. On the M1 I've moved on anyway to UTM.
|
| EDIT: word choice
| sitkack wrote:
| https://github.com/utmapp/UTM
|
| The cool thing about UTM is that it runs hardware virt and
| emulation, so you can run x86 on M1, which Vmware Fusion
| cannot do.
| temac wrote:
| x86 on M1 through Qemu is very slow though. Not really
| usable to run Windows 10 in good conditions, for example
| (good news is that this is rarely needed, Windows on Arm
| running x86 and x64 programs seems quite good)
| true_religion wrote:
| Pairing virtualization software tech with hardware chipsets
| that directly support it seems like a good plan.
| fujidust wrote:
| I think this is the play. They can create or influence
| standards that favor their new position - build vertical
| integration where others in this space cannot.
| TomVDB wrote:
| Absolutely not.
|
| You're thinking that Broadcom acts as a company with a
| technological vision. This is a totally not the case and
| the CEO is very open about that.
|
| Today's Broadcom is a company that optimizes the financial
| performance of technology assets.
|
| There are no long term plans.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Wouldn't that be an abuse of monopoly though? If VMware
| suddenly starts supporting broadcom hardware better than
| other enterprise hardware.
| [deleted]
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Broadcom likes to buy big companies with big moats that trade
| at a reasonable multiple because they have a mature growth
| profile. There are no more chip companies left with that
| profile except Qualcomm, which they tried to buy, and maybe
| Intel although their moat is fading. So they pivoted to
| software.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| IIRC Broadcom was sold to an equities group some years ago, so
| it's not really broadcom the chip manufacturer...but rather an
| investment company for tech
| nikanj wrote:
| Because they want something that's not affected by the chip
| shortage.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| No, that is just incorrect. Please don't speculate if you
| don't know what you're talking about.
| sitkack wrote:
| I think you misunderstand the point of HN, that is
| basically the _only_ thing that occurs here.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| I know, but if someone just flat out makes something up
| I'd hope they'd hedge their language a little bit.
| strunz wrote:
| This was reported by multiple financial news organizations,
| what makes you so confident it isn't true?
| xadhominemx wrote:
| I am very confident this is not true. I am certain I know
| Broadcom's corporate strategy and views on the semi cycle
| better than any financial journalist.
| BoGs83 wrote:
| Because corporate capitalism and investors expect ever higher
| returns. So a company that does good at what it does needs to
| look at new revenue sources to please investors which after a
| while just does mediocre at everything.
| spaintech wrote:
| I have a very different view on this purchase, and I f my thesis
| is right, then it just might be the best move ever ( Michael Dell
| has certainly won again with this deal.) Here is my vie, VMware
| has become the OS of the private cloud. Sure Linux based, but
| from an enterprise perspective, VMWAre is closer to the HW than
| any other OS. Considering that Broadcom is a HW company, and that
| they are looking to fend off Qualcomm, Amd, and Intel as key
| competitors, should they move to build ARM or RISK-V based server
| for the enterprise, they could be at a mejor advantage on those
| CPU architecture. Just a thought from over the pond, but they
| could buy Ampere and be in that market very well positioned to
| take in the Enterprise space end to end, they would only need
| storage if you don't consider VSAN as a valid solution in that
| space. Tim will tell.
| gmassman wrote:
| Who's Tim?
| sokoloff wrote:
| It might be the hypervisor and related ecosystem of private
| cloud today, but I wouldn't bet $61B on VMWare against the
| entire field (xen/kvm in Type 1, and all the container
| solutions) for 2027.
| e40 wrote:
| I wonder if VMware Fusion will get worse or better, because it
| got so bad I switched to Parallels. This was after being a
| customer for a long time.
| vkat wrote:
| For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open
| source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think
| Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works
| or for that matter cares.
|
| Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects.
|
| Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware
| colechristensen wrote:
| I would be mildly interested in a 5 minute pitch of what VMware
| is offering these days, it's been 15 years since I've touched
| any of their products and the way they were doing things then
| really seems like it is becoming increasingly irrelevant so
| what have they been doing instead? It looks like my vague guess
| of "the same but also on top of cloud providers" seems to be
| about right given a quick glance at their website, but I'm
| curious to know a bit more.
| silksowed wrote:
| vmware enterprise footprint and business still seems to chug
| along. most of the world markets lag behind hyperscale
| technology progress.
| geodel wrote:
| They have this VMware Tanzu platform which is like Red Hat
| Openshift. A heavily customized application packaging ,
| deployment management solution on top of Kubernetes. It can
| be deployed on any cloud and on-prem DCs. So kinda multi
| cloud bet. They are selling it in a big way.
| awild wrote:
| They also offer tanzu as on prem cluster where you can
| somehow use kubernetes to provision kubernetes virtualised
| kubernetes clusters.
| awill wrote:
| What does "They are selling it in a big way" mean? I've
| never heard of it, and neither have any of the software
| engineers who are next to me at the office. RedHat
| OpenShift also bombed. They had a great start 11 years ago,
| but then didn't innovate, and worse, released a 2.0 that
| wasn't backward compatible. They used the 2.0 release as an
| excuse to kick off all free plans. What a joke. There's a
| reason Red Hat isn't a leader in Cloud.
| parasubvert wrote:
| They also released a 3.0 and 4.0 of OpenShift that
| weren't backwards compatible :-)
|
| Yet OpenShift is making bank. You'd be surprised how much
| money they make on AWS, Azure, and Google.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| OpenShift is fantastic and I wouldn't hesitate to
| recommend it to any medium sized startup and up. I run it
| in my closet. Most medium sized startups end up building
| out an OpenShift-like K8s but they use 6 months to a year
| plus to do it.
|
| Upgrades within major versions are totally painless, one-
| click affairs.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| They still make the best virtualization software for OSX. I
| use it daily to run desktop Linux on OSX. Video drivers seem
| to be having a tough time with Electron apps these days,
| sigh.
| luma wrote:
| They own a substantial chunk of the on-premises datacenter
| virtualization space. Loads of orgs still run their own kit,
| and VMWare makes some damn nice tools to squeeze the most
| from that investment. There are competitors in the space, but
| none with the breadth and depth of VMWare.
| parasubvert wrote:
| VMware has several billion-dollar or more businesses...
|
| - the core vSphere hypervisor and management software
|
| - Vmware Cloud on AWS which is pretty big on its own, plus
| other cloudy things like datrium / disaster recovery as a
| service.
|
| - cybersecurity (carbon black and secure state), which is
| similar to what Symantec does, will be an interesting overlap
|
| - endpoint management (security for desktops, mobile) which
| was AirWatch
|
| - management (monitoring & automation) aka. vRealize and
| Cloud Health
|
| - workspace / single sign on, similar to okta (Workspace ONE)
|
| - virtual desktops (Horizon) which compete with Citrix
|
| - software defined networking (NSX) which competes with F5,
| Cisco, Juniper etc.
|
| - modern apps (Tanzu) which is largely open source...
| containers & developer tools & data services & agile
| consulting, e.g. Spring, Apache Tomcat, RabbitMQ, Greenplum,
| Wavefront, Bitnami / Kubeapps, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry and
| Pivotal Labs (now Tanzu Labs)
| rsync wrote:
| Fascinating ... your very comprehensive list does not
| contain the only VMware products I have ever cared about:
| workstation and fusion.
| fuy wrote:
| their main business for two decades has been datacenter
| virtualization. Individual developers don't care about
| it, sure, but it's a huge software business.
| IshKebab wrote:
| And has a lot of "similar to {thing I have actually heard
| of}"
| walterbell wrote:
| A few years ago, most of the US dev team for workstation
| was laid off in favor of a non-US team.
| TMWNN wrote:
| You run a well-known online backup company and I don't,
| but my reaction was exactly the same: The only VMware
| products I've ever cared about are Workstation and
| Fusion, neither of which is on the list.
|
| On the one hand, it's pretty cool that VMware has pivoted
| so successfully over the past 15 years from being solely
| focused on a hypervisor (or, I suppose in modern
| terminology, "self-hosted cloud") business that the cloud
| largely supplanted. On the other hand, it's sad for
| someone like me, who used Workstation to run VMs at home
| (I moved to VirtualBox), and have thought at times about
| spinning up ESXi.
| influx wrote:
| I run esxi on my (admittedly beefy), home server. It is a
| fantastic piece of software that can be completely controlled
| through a web browser. I can easily spin up a couple of VMs,
| interact with the install without having to use a remote
| virtual keyboard/video switch, and the whole thing is rock
| solid.
|
| I could probably do a lot of the same thing with Linux
| itself, but the web interface is so nice, I'm keeping it as
| long as it continues to be free for home use.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I'd be really interested in an "i used both" comparison
| between esxi's free offering and proxmox for this sort of
| purpose. I imagine esxi might be more polished, but also
| more limited.
| pkulak wrote:
| I use Proxmox and can do everything OP just described. I
| would assume the esxi is more polished, but I don't spend
| a heck of a lot of time on my hypervisor; mostly on what
| it's hypervising.
| nyx wrote:
| I've used both, though not for anything especially
| complicated. Your guess about the polish level is
| correct; ESXi blows Proxmox out of the water interface-
| wise, especially for some specific tasks like configuring
| networks or managing PCI passthrough devices. As far as
| "more limited" goes, I can't say I noticed much of a
| feature discrepancy, although being open and just sitting
| atop KVM, Proxmox doesn't have any of the artificial
| limitations imposed by VMware (like a cap on number of
| vCPUs in the free version, eugh).
|
| One pretty big one, if you're looking at homelab use, is
| that Proxmox is just Debian, so it's waaaay more likely
| to run on crap-tier commodity hardware, whereas VMware
| has all the usual enterprise-level support commitments
| and so you're very much on your own if you try to force
| it to run on hardware that isn't on their official
| compatibility list.
| influx wrote:
| Excellent point on hardware support. I'm running several
| years old Xeon chips in my server, and ESXI is already
| complaining they might not be supported in a future
| release.
| bityard wrote:
| You can do the same thing with Proxmox VE. IMO, Proxmox is
| a much better choice for stand-alone VM hosts. The UI alone
| is certainly miles better.
|
| Where VMware shines is when you want to virtualize multiple
| datacenters and manage them all from a single browser
| window. Getting hundreds of hosts and datastores managed
| all under one vCenter umbrella all while eliminating single
| points of failure, while not trivial, is the bread and
| butter of VMware and it works very well once it's all up
| and running.
| andyman1080 wrote:
| not super critical but is there a terraform provider for
| proxmox? I looked at proxmox a while back when building
| my home server but went with esxi free because of the
| community provider - https://github.com/josenk/terraform-
| provider-esxi
| laura2013 wrote:
| I can only hope they let VMware operate independently and
| continue growing like they've done in the past decade.
| bobo_legos wrote:
| One thing that I always gave Dell/EMC credit for was that
| they at least outwardly seemed to have left VMware free to
| their own thing. As opposed to a lot of their other
| acquisitions that they bastardized in this rush to sell
| enterprises on everything private cloud. We'll see Broadcom
| ends up taking the same route.
| vkat wrote:
| Quite agree, Dell/EMC treated VMware as independent.
| joedissmeyer wrote:
| It is best to set your expectations extremely low for this
| type of acquisition. My personal opinion: Broadcom is
| _buying_ its way into the Enterprise technology space by hook
| or crook. When Broadcom acquires a company their M.O. is to
| immediately install finance-driven leadership and focus
| strictly on cost cutting measures coupled with accelerated
| profit-making endeavors. The only thing VMware employees have
| to look forward to in the near future are layoffs, all types
| of cost reductions, team consolidations (i.e. you do more
| work with less resources) and severely reduced R&D. And the
| only thing that VMware customers have to look forward to are
| increased VMware costs, more vendor lock-in, reduced
| satisfaction with support, and almost zero innovation.
|
| Again, this is just my opinion so I could end up be wrong. Or
| maybe I am just in a bad mood today... meh
| sharken wrote:
| Bad mood i hope.
|
| Should Broadcom do all those things, they run a substantial
| risk of degrading the products offered by VMware, which is
| a poor business decision.
|
| Given the very profitable state of VMware, it's a lot more
| likely that they will only introduce minor changes.
| TomVDB wrote:
| After being acquired by Avago, Broadcom ceased to be a single
| company. It's a conglomerate of entities/BUs that are
| explicitly asked to NOT work cooperatively, so that each entity
| can be sold at moment's notice if it doesn't deliver the right
| financial results anymore.
|
| Chances are that the current leadership doesn't care about how
| VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase
| metrics that Wall Street considers important.
|
| Expect major cuts in R&D, receptionists, travel expenses,
| general benefits, and virtually no hiring of college grads or
| interns. You'll be on the phone in a queue for hours to get
| outsourced IT support.
|
| Support of open source should be the least of your worries.
|
| Stock price might go up though...
| Thoreandan wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification - it's the corporate-shoggoth of
| HP>Agilent>Infineon+LSI>Avago "Broadcom Inc." not
| underground-dungeon-scandal "Broadcom Corporation". Their
| NASDAQ ticker is still AVGO. :)
| rsync wrote:
| ... and here all I wanted was updates to fusion and decent
| HBAs...
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I was part of Symantec when we were acquired. I didn't agree
| with all Broadcoms moves, but they empowered us to really cut
| the fact and focus on what we were good at.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Cut the fat, I think you mean.
|
| Not sure if that was a typo, eggcorn, or pun on truth and
| fiction post-acquisition...
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Thank you, I did indeed mean cut the fat. I need to cut
| the fat on my fat fingers!
| axus wrote:
| I was very surprised when the product quality went up, for
| the Symantec software I use.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| VMware learned their lesson from OpenStack, where emerging
| upstream technology threatened their virtualization monopoly.
| They also were forced to go in this direction by their
| enterprise customers, who are very dependent themselves on open
| source technology.
|
| One of the opportunities at VMware is monetize the open source
| investment more effectively, especially Kubernetes. I still
| don't totally understand how they plan to do that but wish them
| (you) all well.
|
| Disclaimer: Former employee of VMware
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Given the situation of Docker, it doesn't look good for the
| monetization of Kubernetes, or am I missing something (I'm
| not too familiar with Kubernetes)?
| m3adow wrote:
| There's stuff like Openshift and Rancher as commercial
| Kubernetes distributions as well as a lot of Kubernetes
| "addons" like weave, portworx, etc. Monetisation of
| Kubernetes is totally possible.
|
| Docker failed because they tried to compete with
| Kubernetes, lost and then didn't have a clue how to find a
| niche where they could enrich the Kubernetes ecosystem.
| houseofzeus wrote:
| Docker didn't really attempt to monetize Kubernetes at all
| until the writing was on the wall, instead they had their
| own thing (Swarm) that they were pushing but most of the
| ecosystem went in the other direction.
| theptip wrote:
| Given how pluggable k8s is, it should not surprise you that
| there are companies at every integration point. Tigera for
| network policy. Security policy vendors using admission
| controllers to secure clusters. Linkerd/Istio for service
| mesh. Storage vendors. Etc. Each integration point provides
| a hook for someone to do better than the default behavior
| and charge for it.
|
| The ecosystem is thriving and because the k8s platform was
| built to be pluggable; it is an actual platform. Docker
| (the company) tried to monopolize and monetize when they
| built Swarm, and that's why they lost the cluster
| orchestrator space IMO. Docker (the tool) is just a tool,
| not really something you can monetize easily. Docker (the
| image format) is where most of the value lives, there isn't
| much value to extract there as it's an open protocol.
|
| Docker (the tool) was commoditized by k8s, and now there
| isn't really any way to charge for a differentiated
| implementation. Providing a registry and a best-in-class
| Docker for Desktop experience isn't going to be a huge TAM.
| outside1234 wrote:
| The cloud vendors, that cooperatively are building
| Kubernetes, are making bank off of Kubernetes.
|
| Kubernetes is fine.
| vkat wrote:
| Multi billion dollar businesses. Just look at AWS EKS.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| The lack of monetization was mostly on Docker itself as far
| as I can tell. For example, they could have offered secure
| container supply chains years ago. Instead, companies like
| JFrog got there first. Public cloud container repos are
| another example. Amazon and others got there first with
| products like ECS.
| monocasa wrote:
| Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX?
|
| Taking driver code out of Linux and just running it inside the
| hypervisor has to be the most brazen violations possible.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX?
|
| If you mean, did they remove the vmkLinux layer from their
| product? Yes, they did, back in 2019 soon after they won the
| lawsuit on procedural grounds (the court ruled the person who
| brought the suit didn't have standing, and it was upheld on
| appeal).
| monocasa wrote:
| It sounds like vmklinux is deprecated but still shipping
| for older drivers if I'm understanding their documentation.
| https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/04/what-is-the-
| impact-... vSphere 6.7 (which they're still supporting and
| shipping updates to as it was only released last June),
| includes the vmklinux driver stack.
|
| For those reading along at home, that's a shim layer to
| link GPLed code into the closed source hypervisor.
|
| It's absurd that the company responsible for some of the
| most blatant license violations in the industry (and is
| still actively continuing to violate after a decade) is
| trying to push itself as open source friendly.
| 1024core wrote:
| One thing I've noticed is that M&A activity really picks up just
| before a downturn.
|
| It's just a gut feeling, I have no data to back it up.
| lostcolony wrote:
| I mean...how do you define downturn?
|
| If you mean recession, as defined by two consecutive quarters
| of dropping GDP - if GDP drops, stock markets drop. Not sure
| the directionality there, but the two are usually part and
| parcel.
|
| If stock prices drop, it's a great time for acquisitions if
| you're sitting on cash.
|
| I suspect any time stock markets drop sufficiently, you'll see
| increased M&A activity, regardless of whether it is prolonged
| enough to count as a recession.
| acd wrote:
| Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are
| nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite
| datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure
| running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel
| based virtual machines.
| hnarn wrote:
| > Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to
| the cloud.
|
| This is something that the HN crowd repeats as if it were an
| obvious axiom where no scrutiny is needed. While I'm sure it's
| true that there's a _general_ movement towards cloud-based
| infrastructure, there is a very real and non-trivial part of
| the IT infrastructure of any country that will not move to the
| cloud in the coming decade, if it ever will. This general
| movement is not the same thing as "everything will eventually
| have moved".
|
| The hypothesis that on-site virtualization somehow is an
| obviously dying technology assumes that it must be true that
| on-site hosting will stop existing, which I have a very hard
| time believing. If nothing else (and there are plenty of
| "elses"), strict data security and privacy concerns will keep
| on-site hosting moated for a long time.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I was under the impression each of those had custom
| hypervisors? While perhaps still Linux that doesn't seem like a
| commodity.
| wildfire wrote:
| AWS' Hypervisor is Nitro.
|
| Which is based upon KVM - AIUI.
|
| https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-
| sy...
| sithadmin wrote:
| They're 'custom', but are heavily derivative of KVM in the
| case of AWS (Nitro) and GCP. Azure runs a fork of Hyper-V,
| AFAIK.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Not a fan of vmware (I used to work there) but pretty much no
| one currently can compete with VMware's full product line and
| optimizations
| iKevinShah wrote:
| VMware used to be centered around Virtualization until 2015-16
| or so. Since then it has moved / expanded to Software defined
| Datacenters (technically virtualization, yes), Automation,
| Security (Carbon Black) and lately, K8s (with Tanzu). That does
| not mean a good chunk of revenue might still be from
| virtualization - FWIW, I do not have any idea on that.
|
| Disclaimer: I am an ex-employee of VMware.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I also don't see any obvious synergies with a company that
| specializes in network chips.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are
| nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite
| datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure
| running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel
| based virtual machines.
|
| It's not the lower level primitives here that are valuable from
| VMware, it's the higher level abstractions built on top of them
| that facilitate easier management and use by (relatively) less
| technical people.
|
| You can give a "good at Windows" type technician a few hours of
| training and they can put together a usable vCenter deployment,
| including things like corporate SSO and such. They can drag and
| drop things around and it'll mostly work. And when things go
| wrong and this person is confused about what to do, they can
| call up support for help.
|
| Obviously, this is centered on-prem, which is indeed shrinking
| - but a lot of orgs have a lot of investment in stuff running
| on site, and there are still plenty of cases where having e.g.
| lots of storage and enough compute to "process" it in some way
| physically close to office users can speed up their workflows.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Azure uses Hyper-V under the hood not kvm. Its also not built
| on Linux.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Okay, yes, _Microsoft Azure_ running _Microsoft Windows
| virtualization_ isn 't shocking. They have to dogfood, or
| they'll be laughed at hard.
| kube-system wrote:
| Nobody laughs when MS uses Linux.
| temac wrote:
| Would it be to compete with one of their own product in
| such a major way and despite the integration MS did for
| Linux guests running on Hyper-V, yeah people would laugh.
| Not about them using Linux. About them having Hyper-V.
| Like we laughed about Visual SourceSafe.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I don't understand the stock market. VMW at $50B market cap
| equates to ~$120 per share. The Broadcom acquisition is for ~20%
| more, and yet, the stock price is at $120, not... $145 or
| something.
|
| Can someone more financially literate (or with direct experience
| in the stock market) explain this discrepancy to me?
|
| (comment made at ~9:33am ET, stock market opened a few minutes
| ago)
| [deleted]
| phonon wrote:
| "Under the terms of the agreement, which has been unanimously
| approved by the boards of directors of both companies, VMware
| shareholders will elect to receive either $142.50 in cash or
| 0.2520 shares of Broadcom common stock for each VMware share.
| The shareholder election will be subject to proration,
| resulting in approximately 50% of VMware's shares being
| exchanged for cash consideration and 50% being exchanged for
| Broadcom common stock. Based on the closing price of Broadcom
| common stock on May 25, 2022, the total $138.23 per-share
| consideration represents a 44% premium to the closing price of
| VMware common stock on May 20, 2022, the last trading day prior
| to media speculation regarding a potential transaction, and a
| 32% premium to VMware's unaffected 30-day volume weighted
| average price (VWAP). Upon closing of the transaction, based on
| the outstanding shares of each company as of the date hereof,
| current Broadcom shareholders will own approximately 88% and
| current VMware shareholders will own approximately 12% of the
| combined company on a fully diluted basis. " [1]
|
| 1. The deal might not go through, or the terms might change.
|
| 2. You might not be able to get 100% cash for your shares.
|
| [1]
| https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/e...
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| If the stock is trading at $120/share that means everyone who
| owns stock (and is paying attention and offering it for sale)
| won't sell for less than $120. But that doesn't mean all of
| them, or even most of them, would sell for $120. Many of them
| probably believe their stock should be worth more than $120 and
| expect the price to go up in the future. So if you want to buy
| out the whole company you have to pitch a price high enough
| that a majority of shareholders (or the board of directors as
| their fiduciary proxy) agree to sell at that price. This is
| basically guaranteed to be a substantially higher price than
| whatever the current market price is, because if the average
| shareholder didn't expect the stock price to go up, why are
| they holding shares?
|
| As the deal becomes increasingly likely to go through, the
| stock price will likely gradually shift up to match the deal
| price.
| terra_ignota wrote:
| Your instincts are right, it's just that the price jump
| happened on Monday when the talks were reported in the press
| over the weekend. It jumped from ~$95 on the Friday close to
| $115 on the open, ~20%.
| [deleted]
| ricklamers wrote:
| I think this is actually great news. After acquisition the
| conglomerate level scale will slow innovation. Freeing up
| opportunity for talented folks to start companies in the space in
| the areas that are being underserved by Goliath. In addition,
| these types of deals prove liquidity to financiers creating
| precedent for financing young upstarts.
| didip wrote:
| This deal sounds like it is great for C-suites and investors. I
| don't know if it's great for the employees. My guess is that
| there will be a lot of cost cutting moves soon.
| [deleted]
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Michael Dell will get $24bn! from this acquisition...It's
| fascinating how he turned around a struggling PC company (Dell
| Inc) into a financial engineering machine that made him tens of
| billions.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/18/how-wall...
| [deleted]
| Apocryphon wrote:
| So he Jack Welched his own corporation?
| papito wrote:
| Jack Welch and his students turned companies into steaming
| piles of crap, not gold. GE, Boeing. A few people walk away
| with riches, however.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Good to hear that Dell's schemes haven't done the same to
| his own company. Would it be more accurate to draw a
| comparison to Masa Son? An entrepreneur in tech who ended
| up playing high stakes financial games with his company's
| own money.
| papito wrote:
| No one is as much of a gambler as Masa Son. Masa is not
| particularly evil or scheming - he is just nuts.
| sbf501 wrote:
| But did he know EMC's ownership of VMWare in 2016 was going to
| turn out to be such a stellar cloud performer, or was that just
| IP portfolio luck?
| hnarn wrote:
| The VMWare market cap in 2016 was ~$32B, of course there's no
| objective way to answer your question definitely as yes or no
| but I'd say that VMWare was already at that point more than
| comfortably a more or less de-facto standard for
| virtualization.
| rosege wrote:
| Yeah but there was a big shift away from virtualization to
| cloud and micro services. As a former VMware admin I'm
| surprised VMware is doing as well as they are now. But
| maybe my view is just shaded by the bank I was working for
| that was moving away from it to AWS.
| scarface74 wrote:
| There isn't really a big shift to cloud yet. Only 5% of
| all IT spend is on any cloud provider according to the
| CEO of Amazon and former CEO of AWS [1]
|
| https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-
| jas...
|
| [1] Andy Jassy is my skip^9 manager.
| donalhunt wrote:
| Yep. This has been the sentiment shared by Google Cloud
| execs a lot too. All the players are looking at the 10-20
| year picture with regard market share / spend (in an
| industry where no-one knows what compute infrastructure
| will look like by the middle of that period).
| caymanjim wrote:
| I didn't know VMware was still a thing. What do they even do? Who
| uses any of it?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You can get three Dell servers and a VMware install ISO and
| have a hypervisor with a web interface, a distributed cluster
| filesystem replicating between the nodes, VM failover in case
| of hardware failure, live migration of VMs between nodes for
| maintenance (state and/or storage), a centralised update
| system, VLAN aware guest networking, isolated management
| networking, all up and running in production in half a day -
| less if you someone has already opened the boxes and racked it
| all up before hand. Without any great technical skills needed
| to setup any of it.
|
| With a bit more planning and a larger environment and more
| licensing, and not much more tech skills, you'll have redundant
| trunked network links, it will migrate VMs between nodes to
| balance load, integrate with the node IPMI management to power
| hosts down when the load is light and power them on when the
| load increases, and for enough money on licensing it will keep
| two VMs on different host nodes in sync down to the CPU
| instruction in case one host fails nobody will notice. Also
| with not much tech skills.
|
| And when I say "not much tech skills" you do need to understand
| enough about computing to plan it and cable things in properly
| and deal with VLANs and subnets and ISOs and DNS, routing, and
| VMware's way of doing networking, and the basics. But you need
| to know approximately nothing about /etc/ or XML or YAML,
| cluster quorums, elections, filesystem locking, heartbeat or
| watchdog services, distributed consensus protocols, package
| management, LVM, systemd, hypervisor subsystems, PAM modules,
| Kerberos, webservers, databases, Unix permissions, or etc.
|
| I'm under no illusions that it's cheap, or bug-free, or that
| you never need to SSH in and poke it ever, or that it's the
| right thing for every task, or that it's the modern way. But
| it's an amazing packaging up of a lot of things into a
| worldbeating product, and its integration with Dell
| specifically - Dell hosts, Dell EMC storage - is such a good
| fit that makes me surprised and sad that Dell would sell
| VMware.
| sithadmin wrote:
| VMware has the largest on-premises hypervisor footprint by a
| large margin and sells a zillion other software products to
| layer on top. Pretty much every large public company has a
| VMware footprint in their data center, and frequently have
| their entire on-prem infrastructure built on top of vSphere.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Fair enough. I could have googled it. I live in a bubble of
| Linux and AWS/other cloud services, so this sort of thing
| isn't part of my world.
| drumhead wrote:
| I gather they own Symantec as well, how did that go for them?
| $61bn is a full price to be paying at this stage of the market.
| gertrunde wrote:
| I've no idea how well the Symantec acquisition worked for
| Broadcom, but it was particularly painful for anyone using
| Symantec products.
|
| The ordering/renewal process was so messed up by the transition
| that for approximately 18 months it was almost impossible to
| get a quote or place an order, even to renew an existing
| subscription, long enough that Symantec started just giving out
| subscription extensions to tide people over until the order
| process worked again.
| geodel wrote:
| It is unlikely but if Broadcom boots out SpringBoot and
| associated crapola from their portfolio, it could be a win for
| decent developers in this otherwise bad acquisition.
| brycewray wrote:
| Would guess they're high-fiving at Parallels right now.
| temac wrote:
| VMWare Fusion on M1 was already way behind (to an absurd point:
| it has been > 1 year 1/2 after the M1 launch, and VMWare has
| not yet launched a release of Fusion for it, only betas, and
| they do not target Windows). Overwhelming most of VMWare
| business is about other products anyway.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I've been going back and forth every few years between Fusion
| and || Desktop. I'm currently on a || swing. I guess I'll be
| staying here for a while.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| Do these type of transactions ever end up well for either the
| acquirer or the acquired company?
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > Do these type of transactions ever end up well for either the
| acquirer or the acquired company?
|
| It depends on what you mean by "end up well" and who, exactly,
| is meant by "acquirer" and "acquired". Yes, they're lucrative
| and worthwhile from the point of finance people, a rarified
| sliver of stake-holders and the law firms who buzz around to
| service all these. If they weren't you would not be seeing them
| as much.
|
| From the point of view of technology advancement, the
| professionals who want to actually WORK in these domains, and
| the customers who depend on the products? No. These
| mergers/acquisitions are at best a mixed bag and more often a
| downgrade, or worst of all, a career-derailing adjustment.
| bluGill wrote:
| 20 years ago when I was part of a company that was acquired the
| executives told us that only 1 in 4 were successful, but they
| were determined to make us one of the successful ones. (it
| wasn't)
|
| I have no idea if the 1 in 4 number is correct, but it feels
| reasonable.
| cdumler wrote:
| The point of massive acquisitions are to enrich company
| stockholders (generally the CxO's and key management), lock up
| key engineering talent from the market, and give the manager
| who lead the acquisition a fat bonus. Generally, everyone else
| loses. To offset the cost, typically value is extracted from
| the bought company until the product's value dies. Short term-
| wise, the people involved will get a lot of money and be gone
| by the time the consequences cannot be ignored.
|
| That said, acquisitions can work if there is due diligence. I'm
| in a company that has acquired several companies in a related
| field. Each of the companies have had complementary products,
| and the cultures were vetted to be similar ours before
| purchase, ie small groups (30-50 people) who have demonstrated
| high skill, high trust, and low ego. Finally, there has been an
| effort keep groups generally autonomous while finding ways to
| synergize employees and services. There has been a strong
| feeling of working together. Groups have been willing to share
| their expertise and experience with other.
|
| I guess in other words: the acquisition is a good idea, even if
| a product is subsumed into another product, there is plenty of
| real work to go around for employees to do. If you have to
| promptly fire people "because redundancy," it wasn't being done
| to improve your position in the field.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes. See Oracle.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/market...
| the_only_law wrote:
| Not fair to compare software companies to a law firm.
| bombcar wrote:
| EMC bought VMware for $650 million and Dell bought EMC for $74
| billion and now sold VMware for $61 billion so it worked out
| for someone.
| ghaff wrote:
| The EMC purchase of VMware was probably one of the best tech
| acquisitions of all time. At least financially. You can
| reasonably argue whether VMware's overall trajectory was
| better or worse as a result; in any case, most of the
| original leadership team ended up departing.
| bombcar wrote:
| Someone knew something - that's an insanely low valuation
| for a major player in the (then just starting)
| virtualization market.
|
| But at the time virtualization was considered as something
| "to keep that old Windows NT server/software running" - not
| foundational for all cloud services ever.
| ghaff wrote:
| As an IT industry analyst at the time, it may seem like a
| cheap acquisition today, but it was seen as pretty rich
| at the time. I'm not sure how many people appreciated how
| big a deal VMware was. My understanding is Diane Greene
| didn't want to sell but the VCs wanted their exit. And
| she was eventually pushed out when VMware hit it big and
| she was excessively chafing under EMC control.
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| > Someone knew something
|
| A broken clock is right twice a day, and even EMC CEO Joe
| Tucci was right once in his lifetime.
|
| But don't look at his other acquisitions.
| rehash3 wrote:
| Hmm.. EMC (which essentially was Smoking Joe T as the CEO
| for most its limelight years) did quite well with
| acquisitions, Data Domain, Isilon, VMware and many more
| smaller acquisitions. They never bought a company to
| inherit their cash flow but saw an opportunity to invest
| and grow their business by adding their amazing sales
| machinery which was stellar as well.
| ghaff wrote:
| The Data General acquisition, which got them CLARiiON,
| arguably saved the company during the downturn--given
| that belt-tightening really hurt Symmetrix sales.
| normac2 wrote:
| I think Trello and Atlassian went well (massively different
| scale, though). I think the rep is that Atlassian mainly does
| well by leaving the companies alone as independent
| organizations, more like investment positions rather than
| actually merging the tech.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The more important question is whether these type of
| acquisitions end up well for the customer or the employees. And
| in that case, I think the answer is rarely yes.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| More than half of acquisitions and mergers fail, depending on
| the industry.
| geodel wrote:
| So far I have only used Automic Automation from Broadcom. I found
| it supremely crappy. Its UI brings back memory of (I guess now
| defunct) IBM Websphere. But it is now an "Enterprise Solution" so
| it has to shoved down developer's throat with full force.
|
| Just like analysts said IBM brought RedHat mainly for Openshift
| platform and I think there is some truth to it. Seems Broadcom
| has brought VMWare for their Tanzu platform which is direct
| competitor of Openshift. It is less about virtualization in
| corporate data centers which many agree here is legacy business
| at this point.
| chrisjc wrote:
| Probably an insignificant detail when considering the entire
| portfolio of subsidiaries and services under VMWare, but I guess
| there are some pretty notable projects included in this
| acquisition.
|
| Especially from the Pivotal portfolio such as RabbitMQ,
| GreenPlum, Spring, Hibernate, etc... although I'm sure most here
| couldn't care less about Spring related projects.
| martypitt wrote:
| I do, and this was what sprung to my mind.
|
| I feel like Pivotal has been doing a great job lately -
| especially with Spring. I'd hate to see Broadcomm mess with
| this, but it feels highly possible.
| zkirill wrote:
| We are a tiny bootstrapped startup. Spring is critical for us
| and we rely on RabbitMQ. This news is concerning to say the
| least.
| gunnarmorling wrote:
| Hibernate isn't part of the Pivotal portfolio. I'm sure there
| are contributions by Pivotal employees, but the core Hibernate
| engineering team is employed by Red Hat, who also own the
| trademark, etc.
|
| Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and used to be part of the
| Hibernate team
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