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First, question: > Several top VMware executives have left the cloud-computing company over the past year. Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company?
by nerdjon 3y ago
First, question:
> Several top VMware executives have left the cloud-computing company over the past year.
Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company?
I am now reaching out to friends to see if everyone is ok, this sucks. I don't really get doing layoffs as soon as the acquisition finishes. Wouldn't you first expect that people are going to leave just due to them being bought and then do additional cuts if necessary after that?
I feel like that has always been the strategy with acquisitions minus redundancy like HR.
Otherwise this is a big moral hit, first being bought and then an acquisition at the same time? Who would stay after that?
- IshKebab 3y ago> Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company? That's like 90% of what they do now. They actually make that really clear with little cloud icons on the "Product" menu on their homepage.
- geodel 3y ago> Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company? Well they have this Pivotal Cloud / Cloud Foundry /VMware Tanzu crap. I know this isn't what people mean when they talk about "cloud company" but it works as "private cloud" in enterprises.
- grepfru_it 3y ago>crap What do you suggest as a replacement to CF and Tanzu?
- Stranger43 3y agoWe have had sales people trying to push this to us for the last few years and so far it's been ridiculously priced and nobody seems to come up with plausible real life success stories. My impression is that vmware have had almost no traction for any product beyond stock vsphere and even there the API's see very little use as most customers prefer to point and click in the web interface and are basically happy with what vmware delivered a decade ago in terms of features, but people in this market are also loyal to vmware as it's the known way to get virtualization to smaller server rooms.
- Spartan-S63 3y agoBack in 2020, VMware pivoted hard into the cloud computing/software space with the acquisitions of Carbon Black, Heptio, and Pivotal—I was a Pivot prior the acquisition. They rolled all these acquisitions into a single business unit to sell (formerly) Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), and other products in an on-prem, enterprise PaaS offering. I left shortly after the Pivotal acquisition closed, so I didn't see firsthand how it unfolded, but from folks I talked to, it seemed that VMware batted teams around and really mixed the whole thing up.
- grepfru_it 3y agoPicked up where you left off. It seems that VMware was pulled apart and its carcass was sold off
- bogomipz 3y ago>" They rolled all these acquisitions into a single business unit to sell (formerly) Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), and other products in an on-prem, enterprise PaaS offering." So what happened to Heptio exactlY? Were they combined with Pivotal and spun-off?
- natbennett 3y agoTheir staff got smooshed together with Pivotal and a few other acquired odds-and-ends and largely set to work building a suite of Kubernetes-related products under the “Tanzu” brand. This included a Kubernetes manager (TKG) and an application platform (TAP) that were supposed to replace the BOSH-based Kubernetes installer (TKG-i, formerly known as PKS) and application platform (TAS, formerly known as PCF, better known as Cloud Foundry). They got stirred around a few times via reorg, then the Heptio founders retired. Last I heard everyone in Tanzu was trying to get themselves reclassified as somehow part of the Cloud Foundry/BOSH stuff because it has significant revenue and was believed to be safe(r) from Broadcom layoffs.
- bogomipz 3y agoWow, what a mess. Thanks for the recap. So is the Tanzu product going away then and were they hit hard in these layoffs?
- manuelabeledo 3y ago> I don't really get doing layoffs as soon as the acquisition finishes. It is pretty standard procedure. Buyer usually absorbs leadership first, then they gut sales, then marketing after that. Leadership is kicked out or leaves after a while. They are treated like redundancies, even if they aren't so. I feel for the VMWare folks. I may have my issues with their pricing, but their products have historically been quite solid, while Broadcom strategy is, well, just "buy and spread".
- Fatnino 3y agoIf Broadcom lets the VMware employees decide to leave on their own, they will be losing the top performers and those with highest prospects of getting a job elsewhere quickly. They end up left with the less good employees. But if instead Broadcom proactively sheds the underperformers, then the desired employees are reminded to be scared of unemployment by the carnage. And at the same time the market is flooded with a bunch of people looking for the same jobs a high performing employee would have, so now it's harder to jump ship. All this is disastrous for morale, but no worries, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
- palemoonale 3y agoOur Full hosting service / IaaS / PaaS builts on ESXi / vSphere HA, with custom or OTS orchestrators. It is quite common actually in service provider clouds, at least the ones that are more traditional and not relying on fancy, nwer stacks.
- ultrarunner 3y ago> Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company? I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare. Whether that counts as "the cloud" or not is up to you, but virtualization within datacenter is pretty standard. For what it's worth, every experience I've ever had with Broadcom in the embedded space has been negative. So this came initially as a disappointment, and now I'm disheartened to see my expectations were accurate.
- depereo 3y agoI don't know if it's 'most' but there's plenty of large private-cloud B2B setups offering vm-as-a-service / esxi-as-a-service or something frontended by vmware cloud director. Definitely to the tune of billions of annual revenue worldwide.
- bastardoperator 3y agoI worked at some fairly large hosting companies before cloud took over and never once saw vmware. It was almost always virtuozzo/openvz
- grepfru_it 3y agoThere are two classes of hosting companies, enterprise and small business. Enterprise hosting companies serve enterprise fortune500 customers. They are VMWare. The ones catering to small business are using everything but VMware because of costs. They are not typically large, digital ocean and linode aside.
- bastardoperator 3y agoI still disagree. Verizon serves every fortune 500 company in existence and our enterprise compute offering was not vmware. Not a single vmware node in all 100+ pops. I also worked at Godaddy, zero vmware, even after IPO, and they most certainly have B2B customers too.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
- alwaysrunning 3y ago>I don't really get doing layoffs as soon as the acquisition finishes. Planning layoffs is typically part of the M&A process, so when it completes, they typically already know who is going to be let go and drop the axe at that point.
- alephnerd 3y agoThe people making the cutting decisions are also a removed from individual IC level visibility. These cuts are often done based on financial metrics per product line. You could be an amazing engineer and have a well engineered product, but still get laid off because the product didn't get market traction. I've been on both sides of the equation. It sucks but such is life sadly.
- gitfan86 3y agoAnd ability doesn't fit in the spreadsheet they use to calculate their target profitability. They are going to cut expenses by 40% and increase costs of their products by 20%.
- bluGill 3y agoThat is the point of lay offs. They are not saying you are bad they are saying they don't need someone in your position. sometimes a company will let managers in a different department that is hiring know about coming lay offs and ask/force them to take good people. this is rare though.
- alephnerd 3y ago> sometimes a company will let managers in a different department that is hiring know about coming lay offs and ask/force them to take good people. this is rare though. Depends on the kind of layoff. If it's strategic M&A related this happens fairly often. If it's purely a cost cutting hail mary, then not as much.
- comprev 3y ago
- jabroni_salad 3y agovmware is very popular in the private IAAS space. If you have special legal requirements but are too small a fish for the big players to spend time catering to, this is where you end up. IAAS operators that are competent at operations and business logic but not necessarily having the engineering talent needed to run a kvm fleet.
- natbennett 3y agoThey sell the tools to build private clouds.
- hello_moto 3y agoVMWare is used in the cloud as an alternative option from docker container. VMWare is also diving into K8S space, I'm sure they have some sort of "managed" service offering that bundles their K8S solution. VMWare owns Spring Framework... that's a cloud toolkit.
- rf15 3y agoThanks for pointing out the Spring connection... I wonder how that will impact their development.
- dilyevsky 3y agoVmware bought heptio and with that things like their managed control plane (a la Google’s Anthos) and other k8s stuff. I think most of those folks are gone now though
- natbennett 3y agoThe headline folks from Heptio are gone but the products and staff are still there. They’ve gotten a lot of internal transfers from other parts of VMware.