[HN Gopher] VMware outsourcing their support
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VMware outsourcing their support
Author : kryster
Score : 80 points
Date : 2024-04-27 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rubenerd.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rubenerd.com)
| dralley wrote:
| RIP
| belter wrote:
| Broadcom must have the most idiotic management from all the large
| tech companies. Everybody understands you buy a company to recoup
| the investment, streamline operations and push forward with new
| markets.
|
| But do you have to increase license prices by three times within
| the first quarter of an acquisition? Drop all free licenses that
| allowed for learning of your technologies? Even professionals
| with years of experience of providing VMWare official training
| curriculum are being forced to pay for licenses that were free.
|
| All training responsibilities, dropped with no warning on the
| historical training providers...
|
| What McKinsey Consultant, advised for aliening a customer base of
| 20 years, within the first quarter of an acquisition?
|
| Google, Azure and AWS Sales reps must be salivating at this
| opportunity.
| patfla wrote:
| If you look at its history, Broadcom is a financial acquisition
| company that operates in technology. I think Tan's position is:
| these are (mostly) mature technologies and should be horse
| traded like financial assets.
|
| Got lucky with the LSI Logic design team and Google TPU's.
| Presently $8 bln/yr I understand. Although such serendipity
| increases when you're able to buy everything you see. With the
| exception of Qualcomm.
| belter wrote:
| Let's see how that turns out for them this time. This was
| last year but buy now is probably 5 in 5...:
|
| "1 in 5 VMware customers plan to jump off its stack next
| year" - https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/08/vmware_custome
| r_forre...
| peeters wrote:
| They _want_ 1 in 5 VMWare customers to jump. If they don
| 't, they'll be forcibly pushed off of the edge. Broadcom's
| entire growth model is to take an established player that
| is entrenched in massive corporations, introduce that
| product to the existing portfolio Broadcom offers that
| customer, and then jack the price on the lot. If you're not
| in the Fortune 500, Broadcom doesn't want to talk to you
| and if they keep your business at all it'll be through
| digital sales or third party resellers.
|
| I am not a fan of them and didn't like working for them,
| but their financial results speak for themselves. You can
| attack the ethics of Tan's leadership certainly, but to
| call him an idiot ignores the fact that he's doing exactly
| what his shareholders want. Growing the company at obscene
| returns.
| patfla wrote:
| Unfortunately, an economy is now wholly peopled by
| shareholders, and the most important shareholders are
| usually the owners and corporate officers.
|
| Software dev who's worked in both tech and finance. I
| don't measure things in just shareholder returns.
| peeters wrote:
| Nor do I, just saying "idiotic" is the wrong pejorative
| here. He's doing what he's being paid to do and doing it
| competently and successfully.
| patfla wrote:
| Don't disagree. I regard Tan as a (powerful) local
| optimization where the counter argument to broader
| optimizations is that they're riskier. The latter are
| though more fundamental. New businesses, new processes,
| new products are one thing. Profit-taking is another. To
| get new industries you need far-ranging optimizations.
| jonp888 wrote:
| The view of Broadcom is that VMWare has low growth potential
| and the route to maximum short term financial returns is to
| extract as much money as possible from the largest customers.
|
| So the strategy is to squeeze the 600 largest customers until
| they bleed, knowing they are so entrenched they cannot easily
| migrate. If the next couple of thousand stuck around as well
| that would be nice, but not essential. The long tail of
| hundreds of thousands of customers paying a few dollars a month
| they would gladly be rid of.
| late2part wrote:
| How do you know this is their view? I don't have any strong
| opinion or evidence to argue, but I'm curious if this is
| conjecture or inference or actual knowledge?
| houseofzeus wrote:
| It was basically in their investor presentation on the
| acquisition lol
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| I have heard this from Hock Tan's own mouth during a
| "Coffee Talk" with employees.
| debarshri wrote:
| Based on your views and insights you have if feels like you
| are board member of Broadcom.
| tw04 wrote:
| This is literally what Broadcom does - it's just the first time
| most of the HN crowd has been subjected to it. See: bluecoat
| acquisition, Symantec acquisition.
|
| Drop any pretense that you want to service any customer outside
| of the fortune 500. Then increase prices by several hundred
| percent because you're so imbedded in those fortune 500s, even
| if they want to run from you it'll take them 5 years and you
| can make all your money back in that window.
| redundantly wrote:
| Proxmox added VMware VM imports to their product. They must be
| doing well because of the purchase by Broadcom. Hahaha.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Our VMWare bill went from $66 to $3600 this year (just a dozen
| VMs).
|
| Next year we will be using ProxMox.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| It must be possible to milk this "dumb" investor money -
| which directly destroys the bought goods in the long run.
| Basically you create two teams. Team A develops a business
| version of a open source-good. Team B works on that open
| Source good.
|
| Team A gets acquired. The product destroyed. Team B now
| founds a company becoming Team A, while Team A forks the open
| source product and keeps the game going. Its a ton of
| migrations, but you could get wallstreet to donate to open
| source as a business strategy.
| figglestar wrote:
| I'm not sure this is appealing to wallstreet at all but
| this just describes the appeal of open source as a customer
| to me. VMware is a just perfect case example, they're
| literally firing paying customers and destroying a product
| lots of people are using to make a quick buck. The company
| and the product will ultimately be destroyed regardless of
| their underlying value but not before they make bank.
|
| But if Vmware was open source they never would have bought
| it. The leverage being closed provides is the whole point.
| debarshri wrote:
| 100$-200$ per VM is a fair price I think. Most of the revenue
| generating on-prem orgs can afford it. If you think it is
| expensive then you are not the target segment for VMware.
| orev wrote:
| The fallacy here is that you're ignoring the pipeline. The
| next generation of infrastructure admins are either running
| on all cloud, or running on something they can easily
| access like any KVM based system (like proxmox). VMware is
| instantly a legacy system because anyone who doesn't
| already run it isn't going to bother learning it.
|
| Revenue generating or not, the free platforms are will
| generate more revenue than VMware at such and exorbitant
| cost.
| zamadatix wrote:
| "Can afford" and "expensive" are distractions - orgs don't
| buy things just because they have the money to so they find
| the most expensive option to burn it on. The product has to
| justify the cost vs other options, not just be feasible to
| purchase.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| If you are used to and like VMwares toolset you wont like
| Proxmox.
|
| I would not switch an enterprise from VMWare -> Proxmox
| without a really thorough analysis of what that will mean.
|
| That said the future of VMware is certainly in question.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Check out xen
| ghaff wrote:
| Or KVM. Probably no enterprise type solution like
| something kubevirt-based really makes sense at that
| scale.
| ElusiveBalance wrote:
| Just a blatant case of the creeping fictionalization that is
| destroying good businesses. No one is safe from these new finance
| overlords.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Does it properly uninstall nowadays? As in you can move between
| versions by removing a newer version and installing a old
| version?
| kstrauser wrote:
| This was inevitable given the recent layoffs. Either they're in
| bad financial shape or they're sociopathically firing employees
| unnecessarily. Both are excellent reasons for researching the
| alternatives.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It is somewhat smart capitalism, drive up the prices extract as
| much money as possible as fast as you can and when product stops
| selling write it all off. Executives get their pay checks from
| options and investors see line go up for short time...
| late2part wrote:
| 5 Years ago VMWare support was, in my opinion, absolutely gutter.
|
| Calling in for any questions was met with a support tech who was
| actively hostile and tried their best to find some way to
| disqualify our ability to get support. The first trick was always
| Hardware Compatibility List ("HCL") followed by interrogating us
| about software versions. Before I get the cries of pity about all
| the dumb users who waste their time by not upgrading, we probably
| opened support cases twice weekly - and the same verification
| interrogation happened.
|
| We'd routinely find situations where the stated support for SANs
| wasn't what it said, etc.
|
| I'd have said it could not get worse, but reading what Broadcom
| is doing, I am convinced otherwise.
|
| Anyone using VMWare for business critical things is likely in for
| both a huge pocket book hit and an even larger support headache.
| technion wrote:
| I'll just add that upgrading cam itself be the problem- having
| an update come out that isn't yet hcled with your hba probably
| is fine, until you call support.
| stevenally wrote:
| I junked a VMWare based infrastructure upgrade plan last week
| because of this kind of thing. Life is too short.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| What tools do Google, Amazon or Microsoft use? They are running
| millions of VMs, Presumably its proprietary?
| bionsystem wrote:
| Amazon uses Xen which they call "Xen 2" I think because they've
| made tons of improvements and optimizations over the years.
|
| Google uses kvm. They probably contribute as well although I
| haven't checked.
|
| From a quick search Azure uses a private build of hyper-v which
| surprises me actually but it's possible.
|
| Edit : millions of VMs doesn't mean anything, at the end of the
| day it's just servers each running a bunch of VM, which people
| have been doing for 20+ years. There is no scaling issue there,
| the hard part is storage, networking, orchestration, managed
| services, power...
| Korikaze wrote:
| Amazon left Xen years ago and now uses heavily customized
| derivative of KVM called Nitro.
| hinkley wrote:
| I remember when Dell shitcanned a project to do something like
| this about 15 years ago because they realized it would lead to
| information hiding. Tech support loves easy to fix problems.
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