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Vmware changing hands between corporate overlords like it’s hot potato. VMware under EMC $625M acquisition lasted ‘04-‘15 Dell acquires EMC for $58B in ‘15 wh
by xyst 3y ago
Vmware changing hands between corporate overlords like it’s hot potato.
VMware under EMC $625M acquisition lasted ‘04-‘15
Dell acquires EMC for $58B in ‘15 which includes previously acquired VMware.
Now Dell is trying to balance their books and sells entire stake of VMWare in ‘21.
Broadcom now picks up the pieces of VMware with acquisition completed this year (‘23).
I wonder which corporate overlord will take it over in the next 4-5 years.
Maybe Oracle or MS will be the next to bag hold.
- tw04 3y ago>I wonder which corporate overlord will take it over in the next 4-5 years. There will be no next. Broadcom will get blood from the stone, rest assured. They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box. If you think IBM and mainframe is bad, you've never lived with a technology that Broadcom has acquired.
- MrDrMcCoy 3y ago100%. I still have contacts from when I worked there, and It's worse than feared. Everything is on fire and all the best engineering/support talent has either left or is leaving. Broadcom is not only raising prices, but is set to deliver considerably worse products. It makes me sad, because it was once an incredible place to work. Now I recommend that people avoid them like the plague.
- darkclouds 3y ago[dead]
- kelnos 3y agoIncredible place to work or not, I recall at least as far back as 2004 they were terrible from a B2B support standpoint. Impossible to get help with buggy drivers, everything opaque and poorly documented. And don't get me started on trying to get their chipsets working on Linux. Up until recently, it was nearly as bad as nvidia's garbage. Even now, I'm not sure if everything is well supported; I've avoided BRCM wifi like the plague for years now.
- Angostura 3y agoI think the commenter may have been referring to VMWare rather than Broadcom.
- junon 3y agoThis is indeed sad. VMware was some of the best at one point. In my opinion, it still sort of is.
- xyst 3y agoNever heard of Broadcom. Are they like the private equity of tech? Kind of sounds like it.
- inputError 3y ago[dead]
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoYou almost certainly have Broadcom in your pocket.
- latchkey 3y agoThese bits absolutely traveled through a Broadcom NIC.
- Cyph0n 3y agoAs someone who worked on SP routers at Cisco - yes to the above.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- ikiris 3y agoMuch to the regret of anyone trying to manage them. Cheap is nice, but I miss the days when chips did things you wanted.
- zaat 3y agoSome other bits were silently discarded by same Broadcom NIC, no particular reason given and no event wasn't registered
- latchkey 3y agoThankfully we have TCP retransmission.
- lokar 3y agoThey have actually been pretty open that this is the plan. And all the secondary products and small customers can wither away even faster.
- notacoward 3y agoIBM? Try EMC or Cisco. I ended up at the former by acquisition; many friends ended up at the second likewise. AFAICT they both have much worse records of turning acquisitions into abandonware than IBM does (not that IBM's is great). Oracle and Microsoft have already been mentioned, but Intel deserves a place on that horrible list too. Tech has been full of such fat and lazy predators for a long time.
- rammer 3y agoAnother perfect example of a large company acquiring and killing the support and the product is Intuit"s acquisition of Tsheets. And more recently the working progress which is Intuit's acquisition of MailChimp.
- steve1977 3y agoEMC already had their go at VMware ;)
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoCisco has done well with Meraki and Duo, no?
- eskaytwo 3y agoThey deliberately kept them at arms length to protect the brand value
- manicennui 3y agoIs there a single large tech company that doesn't fuck over the customers of their acquisitions?
- SSLy 3y agoHPE?
- crest 3y agoThey even fuck over their own customers by locking away documentation and firmware updates behind a support contract paywall.
- pjmlp 3y agoSadly, I have wasted many hours reading HP-UX documentation, and also hunting the Modula-2+ and Modula-3 papers, as per Compaq and DEC Olivetti acquisitions.
- flopsamjetsam 3y ago> hunting the Modula-2+ and Modula-3 papers, as per Compaq and DEC Olivetti acquisitions The programming languages? What's the story there, were they acquired?
- johnvanommen 3y ago> They even fuck over their own customers by locking away documentation and firmware updates behind a support contract paywall. I used to work for HPE on their OpenStack team, and getting support, even as an employee, basically required me to have a rolodex full of engineers all over the world. A tremendous amount of troubleshooting was just looking up who had committed code, then tracking them down when something blew up.
- ronsor 3y agoAs of late, probably Microsoft does it the least, unintuitively enough.
- factormeta 3y ago>They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box hmm, why would people still use VMWare? Honest question. Maybe there are some licensing issues I'm not aware of. Isn't vbox open source? If not, wouldn't even things such as https://copy.sh/v86/ https://copy.sh/v86/ in the browser would do most virtualization trick now days?
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoEdit: the following statement is incorrect and retracted: ‘Virtualbox is not free for commercial use iirc’ Esxi is an enterprise product which engineers are familiar with, the cost of the product vs the cost of migration and upskilling in alternative tech should not be underestimated, particularly when it’s the thing that runs all your other things. Edit: in case you’re not aware, many organisations still leverage on-prem virtualisation technologies - that might not be obvious to people that haven’t seen it.
- p3n1s 3y agoVirtualbox is GPL licensed. Only the extension packs are non GPL. In any case virtualbox competes with VMWare player/Workstation/fusion which we all should know is not their core business.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- barkingcat 3y agomost people don't use vmware the way you use virtualbox. The money making part of vmware licensing is the baremetal hypervisor ESXi, the competitors are xen or hyperv and the likes. The lock-in part of vmware is the vsphere management software, that allows you to move VM's en mass from one baremetal machine to another baremetal machine, or allows you to nest vm's, etc. manage your entire fleet of vm's which could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, from one management interface. it's basically docker except it's actual entire vm's being moved around. VMWare ESXi being a baremetal hypervisor means you can run different OS's on top of these vm's and imagine being able to move these VM's all running different OS's around in your ecosystem. That's what people pay the big bucks to vmware for. It would be very difficult to build the vsphere/esxi ecosystem with pure opensource tools (it's possible with Xen, etc) but you'd be right back at paying some vendor a massive amount of money for building, integrating, and supporting this kind of system. (Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks). As an aside, the consumer "vmware" software that you install on your workstation is such a small portion of their business, they basically spend no money on fixing/upkeeping. Apple silicon support was in beta for a loooong time, and they don't actually care about their workstation product. ESXi makes the money.
- Spooky23 3y agoYup. Broadcom is the CA of our era.
- thedougd 3y agoYes, and they even bought CA.
- mergy 3y agoCA = Computer Associates for the youngsters.
- elbear 3y agoThank you!
- taskforcegemini 3y agothank you, was thinking Certificate Authority
- unethical_ban 3y agoOh God... that's what the CA in CA Spectrum was? One. NEW. CRITICAL. Alarm.
- rr808 3y agoWeird I used to use broadcom chips decades ago. My new job uses Autosys - by Broadcom wtf?
- worewood 3y agoLiterally, since they acquired them.
- Spooky23 3y agoLol. I didn't realize that. The product i used to use from CA years ago was sold to another tech necromancer - Attachmate. I thought CA was part of whatever shitshow acquired them! :)
- raincom 3y agoMaybe, Broadcom's strategy is 'to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box'. Broadcom spent $69B to acquire VMWare. They just need to squeeze blood for another 10 years. VMware's revenue for 2022 is $13B, and net income about $1.8B. Trim sales department, remove duplication(HR, IT, etc), cut down development, remove many make-work projects that the middle management engages in, increase licensing/support cost. They will focus more on net income, financing costs for $69B will be taken care of by layoffs and other stuff.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoPretty much this. I wish proxmox would get off their butts and release a better management setup to deal with multisite, as I would love to complete the move to their product for our last remaining vmware systems.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoTbh I was really surprised how Workstation still got major updates after that news from 2ish years ago where they fired the whole team working on that and moved its development to India . It already seemed like they wanted to focus on the core business of ESX and switch workstation to maintenance mode, but no, we for example got major improvements in 3D pass-through, like Vulkan and d3d10/11 support.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoSimple: there's devs in India who can code well and not every Western developer is an irreplaceable John Carmack so not every offshoring story ends badly.
- traceroute66 3y ago> Simple: there's devs in India who can code well Sure, without a doubt, there are exellent devs to be found worldwide. But let's face the reality ... Western corporates don't go outsourcing in India for the talent. They go outsourcing in India because they want to wield the axe on what they perceive as the expense of Western developers. So, if they're not willing to pay Western developers, they're not exactly going to be looking at the premium end of the Indian talent pool either are they ! Especially as a typical remuneration structure for senior management is that you are rewarded with a bonus based on the amount of cost-cutting you've achieved.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>So, if they're not willing to pay Western developers, they're not exactly going to be looking at the premium end of the Indian talent pool either are they! I beg to differ. You're either ignorant or have no idea how many SW and HW you interact with regularly from big name companies, has been through the hands of skilled Indian or other offshore devs which while being cheaper than American devs, are in now way worse programmers, sometimes the opposite. You seem to equate pay only with talent and skill, but that's rarely the case. Lower paid international devs aren't necessarily worse than their American counterparts and well paid American devs aren't always better than international talent. Your pay is more a function of opportunities and supply/demand in your area rather then purely on your own skills. Otherwise explain me how the same international devs who struggle to crack 50k in their own developing country can suddenly score 200k+ the moment they're in the American labor market. They don't magically become 4x better coders the moment they cross the border.
- m-p-3 3y agoThey also acquired Symantec. When you think a product can't get any worse..
- lhoff 3y agoFunnily enough, I know of two instances where companies got rid of their mainframe driven by the license cost for Gen[1] which was bought by Broadcom in 2020. I heard they were only issuing 5 year licenses now. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Gen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Gen
- tech_tuna 3y agoAWS, Azure and GCP are going to see some growth from this. If you were an ESX customer and needed a good reason to finally embrace the cloud - here it is.
- 3seashells 3y agoSays something about value vs evaluation?
- api 3y agoThere’s a market out there for a very well designed turn key cloud with things like managed Kubernetes and Postgres you can deploy on bare metal or cheap VPSes. Too bad they aren’t looking at that. They have plenty of expertise and some of the software pieces already developed. I bet the problem is that they are too “enterprise” and couldn’t price it low enough. If it were too expensive it wouldn’t be competitive with big cloud managed offerings.
- UtahDave 3y agoVMware does have managed kubernetes
- daddylongstroke 3y agoLike HPE GreenLake's Private Cloud?
- whalesalad 3y agoLike the village bicycle - everyone has taken it for a ride.
- lionkor 3y agoHey, she has a name!
- steve1977 3y agoI don’t see MS having any interest in VMware. They have their own virtualization tech already and it would only cannibalize Azure, which seems to be pretty much were their money is now.
- brirec 3y agoWhile I agree Microsoft probably doesn’t want to buy VMware, they absolutely have a pretty strong “hybrid cloud” solution, which basically means running an Azure hypervisor on your on-prem servers. Really it’s just Hyper-V with extra “cloud management” bits (“Azure Arc” and friends), but it’s _relatively_ friendly to manage alongside your Azure cloud resources once you set it up. Bottom line is, I really don’t think they’re worried about on-prem hypervisors competing with Azure!
- steve1977 3y agoYeah that's kind of what I was about (though probably not worded very well). For the on-prem virtualization use cases they are interested in, they already have the necessary technology with Hyper-V. I actually thought that vSphere offers some stuff in the hyperconverged area that Hyper-V doesn't, this is where I could see it competing with Azure. However it seems Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct seems to be pretty much on par, at least on paper. So there's even less reasons why MS would be interested in VMware. Only maybe to get rid of a competitor.
- strangemonad 3y agoNot to mention Pivotal interwoven into that story
- scandox 3y agoThey're picking up the pieces for 69 billion. Your analysis makes it sound like VMWare is falling apart. Going by price it suggests it is going from strength to strength no?
- jacquesm 3y agoThat price is a reflection of future financial potential, not of commercial success. Very few people would pick VMWare for new stuff today unless it is a large on-prem installation (and there are still plenty of those). But they are past their peak and the bulk of recovering that will come from existing customers, not from new ones. You lock yourself in to anything related to Broadcom at your peril.
- locusm 3y agoProxmox and XCP-NG are well placed to take their customers and gradually add any missing functionality. Although neither have feature parity with VMWare they are adding new things all the time and are very responsive to their respective communities. XCP-NG even has a VMWare to XCP migration tool built in. However, in my experience using both I would avoid Proxmox specifically if your workloads include heavy SQL Server / Exchange usage. The bug in question affects all KVM based solutions.
- stephen_g 3y agoYeah, I was only ever a ‘casual’ ESXi user (we only ever had a couple of hosts and two dozen or so VMs, and nothing super mission critical), and I’m amazed at how good Proxmox is now we’ve started using it instead of ESXi given the Broadcom acquisition. Obviously if you’re running dozens of hosts and thousands of VMs, needing live migration and things like that, then it’d probably be missing a lot of features you’d want, but for smaller stuff it’s pretty crazy how well it works.
- woleium 3y agoand each subsequent owner stripmines the company for the IP (patents) they desire.
- AlphaSite 3y agoIt’s impressive how they’ve effective paid 81 billion for vmware, arguably making it the largest tech acquisition in history.
- hinkley 3y agoI am really disappointed that Dell did not accomplish enough with VMWare to hit my radar outside of a couple of fans at tech meetups. I really thought there was a strong play there to do a major private cloud play as part of Dell's 'come back story' and then nothing. But maybe that's exactly the problem. For a container based solution you still need a hypervisor but if you invite hypervisor people to the table, to they really want to champion linux containers or do they want to try to reach a local maximum by squeezing all of the fat out of VMs. Even the Java to an extent 'got it' more than Dell+VMWare. I abandoned Java as a platform right around the time Docker went from whispers in dark corners to a quiet ping on people's radars. Within a couple years of that, the JVM team had increased their level of effort to shrink the system footprint from what I would label bet-hedging to aggressively. You need a small JVM if you're going to pack five services and/or ten JVMs onto the same host. Initially J2EE imagined itself to be multitenant, and it did a poor job of re-implementing half of Erlang, poorly. Containers were clearly on their radar.