New Broadcom sales plan may be “insignificant” in deterring VMware migrations
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
I feel like Broadcom has already showed their cards here. Even if you are to take them up on this offer it's only a matter of time until they try to turn the screws again. Better to just transition away from this mess while you can.
Upvote
343
(343
/
0)
The rest can be read here without having to go the Nazi Bar:
https://imgur.com/gallery/trust-thermocline-a1sxiIT
Upvote
156
(180
/
-24)
Upvote
69
(72
/
-3)
Still can't get pricing on VCF or whatever it called. Tanzu license expired and unable to renew the subscription. It's a great time to migrate away from this fiasco
Upvote
80
(80
/
0)
Yeah, at this point it's too late. You have already revealed yourselves as rapacious assholes, so 'Uh, yeah, we've decided not to poop on you this week' is only going to work for the dumbest of the dumb. Luckily for them, there are still a lot of stupid corporations. They might even up ahead by losing 60% of their customers but jacking up rates on the rest by 10x :/ - contrary to what they keep insistently telling us, sufficiently evil usually does prosper, it's just small-time evil that sometimes gets punished.
Upvote
90
(90
/
0)
BC to customers: We're gonna fuck all of you so hard, all of your kids will be born with bleeding asses!
Customers exit the door, flipping two birds at once to BC.
BC to customers: WAIT! Instead of all of your kids, we'll only fuck SOME of you so hard so ONLY those kids will be born with bleeding asses.
Something tells me they're not going to stop the stampede for the door anytime soon with that kind of bullshit.
What kind of morons run BC today?
Oh, right... Techbros.
So this is all playing to the same script as any other techbro cluterfuck these days.
Upvote
88
(104
/
-16)
Upvote
58
(59
/
-1)
I'm sorry... what partners? VMWare had partners. Broadcom ended those agreements. There aren't a bunch of channel sales people just sitting in suspended animation waiting for the day that Broadcom revives them. They and their customers have had to find alternative solutions. These channels aren't known for moving quickly; it's taken a year for most of them to adjust things such that they can get by without VMWare. It would take a year to adjust those pipelines back -- assuming they could trust that Broadcom's offerings would stay stable over that transition period and into the future -- a sentiment all this flip-flopping doesn't do much to encourage.
Upvote
174
(174
/
0)
They've done this with multiple companies, people either don't pick up on it, don't care, or feel like they have a choice but to play their game.
Upvote
30
(30
/
0)
If someone shows you they are an asshole, believe them.
If they later claim 'Just kidding,' be very skeptical.
If they later claim 'Just kidding,' be very skeptical.
Upvote
123
(123
/
0)
I find this to be very odd. I thought that it was obvious to Broadcom that with these changes anyone who could migrate off of VMWare would do so. That the purpose behind these changes was to squeeze additional revenue from a product that they expected to die out in a fairly short span of time (~5 years). I guess that some customers who were already deep enough in the VMWare ecosystem that they weren't hurt by the bundling changes, but I generally assumed that Broadcom was simply exploiting the fact that enterprises are slow moving and would take years to migrate away to cash in.
Upvote
55
(56
/
-1)
Who knew that if you turn the thumb screws too tight the customers won't like it.
Upvote
26
(26
/
0)
...to maximize the lock-in and shield us from the consequences of our future evil machinations.
Upvote
28
(28
/
0)
Upvote
20
(20
/
0)
It can't be the pricing... It must be who the customers are writing the checks to... Yeah, that's it. Give the customers back to their VARs, that'll get them to pay 10 to 20x.
Upvote
38
(38
/
0)
Wait wait wait. So they fucked both the reseller channel with pricing and their VAR channel by stripping the customers?
Oh buddy. Someone didn't learn by watching SAGE FAFO.
Oh buddy. Someone didn't learn by watching SAGE FAFO.
Upvote
42
(44
/
-2)
The MBAs are the problem. Same with healthcare, same with food, same with housing...
Upvote
85
(90
/
-5)
My org has a mix of Nutanix and VMWare, and even a sprinkle of Proxmox. At the end of they day, they all do the same thing. BC is crazy thinking they can charge a premium for a commodity service. If I were in charge I'd rather pay a few talented humans to manage a free product like Beeks did rather than give money to some soulless company.
Upvote
46
(47
/
-1)
Too late, Broadcom.
You probably already have been removed from many large customer's "trusted provider" list and added to their risk management list instead.
With an initial action of "mitigate".
Expect declining business while you are transitioned to the "avoid" status.
You probably already have been removed from many large customer's "trusted provider" list and added to their risk management list instead.
With an initial action of "mitigate".
Expect declining business while you are transitioned to the "avoid" status.
Upvote
69
(69
/
0)
Right after they ended all the reseller agreements, they wrote new agreements with a much smaller number of VMware partners (my employer included). This effectively created an instant channel of anything-but-VMware resellers who need to find something else to sell and support, at the same time that their long-time customers were seeking an exit from VMware as well. It's the enterprise software equivalent of a world power getting hundreds of their tanks stuck in Ukraine, and the farmers coming and drag them away with tractors.
Upvote
53
(53
/
0)
Just need a 3-phase plan to deal with Broadcom:
1 - Move away from them
2 - Let them rot
3 - Burn the remais and seal the ashes on a safe, drop the safe on a very deep ocean.
Better safe than sorry.
1 - Move away from them
2 - Let them rot
3 - Burn the remais and seal the ashes on a safe, drop the safe on a very deep ocean.
Better safe than sorry.
Upvote
32
(32
/
0)
Absolutely. I believe that. It takes time to plan a large scale migration away from one product to another, especially when the first product is deeply embedded at the infrastructure layer. I can well believe that there are a significant number of customers who sucked it up, paid the excessive charges for a year, and started rolling up their sleeves to get off the damn product.
Twelve months isn't long enough for the tale to be fully told. Two to three years is more like it. If there's going to be a flood of people moving away from VMware (and I think there will be), we'll see it really start to happen soon.
Upvote
50
(50
/
0)
Maya Angelou said, “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Upvote
29
(29
/
0)
Broadcom fully expected to drop customers from the changes. Hell I'd argue that's what they wanted. They have done everything they can to shed smaller customers. What they didn't expect was that some of their whales would transition away from them. Their plan was to basically take those top 2000 customers and just keep milking them for eternity. I guess they felt if you had thousands of VMWare hosts with 10's of thousands of VMs on them the cost/effort/risk of moving all of that to a new hypervisor would keep them on VMWare.
But it looks like some are doing it, and as CIOs and CEOs see other big companies jump ship successfully, they will feel more comfortable considering it for their companies. They may have accidentially sent their product into a deathspiral they absolutly did not want.
They have also misjudged how much some of these large companies value their partners over VMWare themselves. I've seen this with other vendors as well, where they try to take large orgs away from their partners and the orgs get PO'd and push back. Sales execs from these partners usually have pretty tight relationships with the executives at these companies. They can and will suggest new products if a vendor is pissing in their Wheaties.
Upvote
64
(64
/
0)
Heart of Dawn
Ars Praetorian
I really don't know what they were thinking. There isn't a market in the world that can stomach a 1000% price increase.
And I don't know what is worse; that someone didn't do the math and realize the customers' bills would go up that much, or that they did and decided to push ahead anyway.
And I don't know what is worse; that someone didn't do the math and realize the customers' bills would go up that much, or that they did and decided to push ahead anyway.
Upvote
35
(35
/
0)
For anyone who wants that in text form:
The rest can be read here without having to go the Nazi Bar:
https://imgur.com/gallery/trust-thermocline-a1sxiIT
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588115310124539904.html
And the follow-up thread:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588148634662707200.html
Edit: the imgur link doesn't have the full initial thread either.
Upvote
22
(24
/
-2)
In the short term, if Broadcom loses a lot of smaller customers, but can drastically raise prices on their remaining whales, they might actually become more profitable in the short run.
In the long run, though, other solutions that customers migrate to will probably flourish. Some solutions may cater to SMBs and not scale well to large enterprises. Those don't really matter to Broadcom. However, if some of these solutions do work well enough at enterprise-scale, they will eventually start to compete for VMware's remaining users.
All of a sudden there's a lot more interest in VMware alternatives and there's going to be a lot of development in that area, at the very least in open source alternatives and support services for those open source alternatives. There may also be an opportunity for a new proprietary software vendor to become a market leader.
Upvote
24
(24
/
0)
Is anyone a little surprised that Broadcom hasn't tried pivoting toward being more comically evil in order to get things back on track?
Obviously the problem isn't that vmware costs too much; it's that using broadcom NICs, switch chips, and HBAs with unauthorized hypervisors is not monetized hard enough; and customers are not being shown the value the could be receiving with the 'packet processing entitlements' and 'logical block addressing credits' bundled with quality hypervisor products...
Obviously the problem isn't that vmware costs too much; it's that using broadcom NICs, switch chips, and HBAs with unauthorized hypervisors is not monetized hard enough; and customers are not being shown the value the could be receiving with the 'packet processing entitlements' and 'logical block addressing credits' bundled with quality hypervisor products...
Upvote
17
(17
/
0)
We are by no means a large VMWare shop. Couple of hundred hosts with a few thousand guests. We don’t do any of the fancy stuff like NSX. Plus VDI stuff.
We are done with them. We have the plan approved will start executing in Q1.
Fuck BC.
We are done with them. We have the plan approved will start executing in Q1.
Fuck BC.
Upvote
60
(60
/
0)