14 ms·

VMware to cut 900 jobs

84 points by ishbits 14y ago

dobbsbob 14y ago
this is why I don't work for mega software corps i bet all these poor bastard devs had to do 'team building exercises', file endless TPS reports, and forced to enjoy TGIF jeans day to indoctrinate you into the company cult then it's layoff time.
- amitutk 14y ago
  and small companies don't fire people?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
    - jonathanwallace 14y ago
      Small companies don't have to. They're small and the culture is immediately affected by the owners/founders/executive team directly.
  - jussij 14y ago
    Small companies pay you less, make up the shortfall in stock options, work you longer hours and then go belly up ;)
  - YZF 14y ago
    In big companies good people can end up being laid off because they happen to be in the wrong team/group/project and some clueless bean counter decides that's the business that needs to be eliminated. As far as large companies go it gets a lot worse than VMware though they seem to have lost direction somewhat. The problem of largeness is that decision makers are so far removed from the decision they can't possibly make good decisions. It's certainly possible for small companies to make bad decisions as well.
    - untog 14y ago
      In small companies good people can end up being laid off because they happen to not be buddy-buddy with their boss, and there's no oversight. Or because they aren't related to the owner. It cuts both ways, for sure.
    - kyrra 14y ago
      And at small companies, a boss may fire someone they just don't like personally. And not all bosses at small companies necessarily understand what their underlings do for a company. At big companies, if it is done right, the upper level management may ask for input from 1st line managers as to who they should fire. Also, my last company, all managers had to rank their underlings, and those at the bottom had a chance of being trimmed if there were layoffs. Many big companies will listen to those first line managers, and almost any upper-level manager is aware of their lack of knowledge about the leaves of the management tree.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        Yes, you can be laid off from a small company because they lose one of their large clients for reasons that are absolutely nothing to do with you. They will then look to trim off "luxury expenses" and if they are not a tech company, having a full time IT/dev guy is likely to be one of them.
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      Employment is capricious in most situations. Large and small organizations can both have politics, can see drastic restructuring when business changes or a major client makes a change (drops a product, demands a change, ...). Large companies may insulate somewhat against capricious changes, though non-operational circumstances (particularly mismanagement or liquidity crunches of the holding corporation) can cause sudden and drastic changes (Borders, UAL, American Airlines). Small companies can have cash-flow issues as well. There's very little that's assured in life. Death and taxes you can count on.
    - darkarmani 14y ago
      > In big companies good people can end up being laid off because they happen to be in the wrong team/group/project and some clueless bean counter decides that's the business that needs to be eliminated. Why do they have to be clueless? Projects are never failures? They could cut a terrible project and still end up laying off good people. Is that a bad thing?
  - ttar 14y ago
    I was fired from a startup, and I was their best developer. Needless to say, they are now going down. Making the engineering team political will doom any startup.
- bitops 14y ago
  In defense of VMware...I work at VMware and it's been great so far. At least in my division, there is very little "big company BS" to put up with. I've been here for a year and I've yet to file a single TPS report, attend a team building exercise, and they throw company-wide beer bashes every Friday (usually with pretty good food). It's a good place to work, in other words. Is it the same as a startup? Not at all. But if you're going to join a big company, you shouldn't be expecting that either.
- m0nastic 14y ago
  How many of these 900 jobs are developers? Not that I feel great about anyone losing their jobs, but it's hard to get a sense of what this means for VMWare without knowing their "restructuring plan". Are they HR department consolidations from acquisitions? Sales consolidations? There's a difference. I assume they're not replacing 900 software developers with virtualized developers who run just above the metal.
- joshAg 14y ago
  i work for riverbed. before their opnet acquisition in december they had about 1600 employees. now they have more, but i don't know if the new size is supposed to be public or not. my team building exercise was last week and it was 3.5 hours of go-karting in burlingame and a catered lunch. we had the rest of the day off. it was the first team building exercise my team did in my 12 months here, unless you count things like a halloween or christmas party. i've never had to do a tps report. the closest thing we have would be updating our internal wiki every week with a weekly status. we get to wear whatever the fuck we want. i got teased about going out for interviews when i wore a button-down shirt on laundry day instead of an ozzfest t-shirt with a massive screaming demon head on it (i thought it would be unprofessional; silly me). that's not to say that you get made fun of for wearing button-down shirts; i only did because i pretty much only wear t-shirts to work. i'd say about 3/4 of my team wears button-down shirts or the female equivalent. most people wear jeans. shorts are common in the summer. some people wear flip-flops year round. the idea that all big companies are going to be bad or even just worse than small companies is just silly. yes, there's shitty large companies, but there are also shitty small companies and shitty medium companies. but that's because of a bad or incompetent management team, not because of the size of the organization.
  - chetanahuja 14y ago
    Heh... it's funny/nice to see someone mentioning riverbed as an example of a "big company". I laugh because I was there when 150 counted as a huge headcount and the SF office had to move to fremont street (and before there was a south bay office). I left when it rapidly grew to about 600 or so soon after the IPO.
    - joshAg 14y ago
      heh, i kind of know what you mean. I interned there in 2010, and then joined full time in jan 2012, and i was amazed how packed the sf office had become. now i work down in the new sv office, which has become nearly full within just a few months.
- natural219 14y ago
  Not at all. VMware was a great place to work for, at least the SpringSource division. Other than daily standups, about 90% of my time was spent doing just feature planning and development.
kyrra 14y ago
I don't believe these people are being fired... at least not all of them. Take a look at a report from 2 months ago[1]. 600 people from VMWare are working on Pivotal, if those people don't count on VMWare's books anymore, that would be a reduction in headcount. Also, the Chicago Tribune[2] article is better than the BizJournals one. One key point in this article is that by the end of 2013, they expect to hire 1000 new employees. This all sounds like shuffling around of people and trimming a little fat, and has nothing to do with VMWare possibly doing badly. [1] http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/12/05/vmware-confirms-pivotal-big-data-cloud-application-platform-spin-off/ http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/12/05/vmware-confirms-pivotal-... [2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-vmware-resultsbre90r139-20130128,0,1231388.story http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-vmware-resu...
- kjackson2012 14y ago
  In another article, they mentioned that they would be hiring as well, so they expect total headcount to be 1000 more than they have right now. They are doing a lot of expanding after they bought all the land around Hillsview, so it would be kind of bad if they started to cut really deeply, a lot of their buildings would be empty.
- xorgar831 14y ago
  Although Pivotal was being led by Martiz, who has left the company. https://blogs.vmware.com/console/2012/12/the-pivotal-initiative.html https://blogs.vmware.com/console/2012/12/the-pivotal-initiat... EDIT: Although he's now the Chief Strategy Officer at EMC, so maybe that's good. http://www.emc.com/corporate/emc-at-glance/exec-team/index.htm http://www.emc.com/corporate/emc-at-glance/exec-team/index.h...
kjackson2012 14y ago
I shorted VMW just before the close today via puts. It was only 2 contracts and the strike price was at $90. I was going to bet more, I usually go in a position with 10 contracts, but I have some financial obligations coming up so I didn't want to risk too much. I have a few friends that work there. They are happy, but they say that the company lacks any sense of urgency. After Maritz left and more recently Steve Herrod, there seems to be a dearth of really brilliant and inspirational people in the top positions. A lot of great engineers were lost after the 4 year post-IPO options expiration came due last year. As well, there is a lot of middle management, and lots of politics, and apparently lots of fat-cat principal engineers that stick around and do not very much. All of this spells a recipe for stagnation. The debacle over the last year or so with licensing only cemented the idea that ESX is expensive, and Hyper-V is getting to "good enough" status.
- vorg 14y ago
  > As well, there is a lot of middle management, and lots of politics, and apparently lots of fat-cat principal engineers that stick around and do not very much. With the firings-by-another-name coming up, expect the politics to get nastier. We'll see the middle managers who don't do very much to turn on the ones that do, leaving an even greater dearth of brilliant coders.
- beedogs 14y ago
  Go figure; company goes public, company goes stagnant. Seems like a common theme in the industry.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    Counting the EMC years, VMWare has been public for more than half its existence. By your assessment, it's been stagnant since before most people even heard of it.
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      Remove the EMC years then...
maerek 14y ago
I'm curious what business lines are being trimmed, as referenced in the article. What other lines of business (the phrasing makes me think this is externally facing business, not internal departments) is VMware involved in beyond the core virtualization biz?
- klearvue 14y ago
  Zimbra is one.
n0mad01 14y ago
i cannot believe it. > projecting revenue in the range of $1.17 billion to $1.19 > billion, compared with $1.25 billion expected by analysts. > VMWare shares fell 15 percent they're still talking about 1.2 BILLION in revenue. it's never enough ...
- VeejayRampay 14y ago
  Yeah that's why that whole "job creators" / "we built this" routine doesn't really register with me. Let's call it what it really is, an extremely well-designed (I have to recognize) machine to generate as much money while employing as few people as possible to maximize profit. Now what they're doing with all that cash, I'm still wondering to this day. If someone has a sensible answer to that question I'd be really interested in understanding the rationale. And this is a serious question, since I always thought that laying off people was a last resort type of strategy. EDIT: Rephrased to be less inflammatory and more open to discussion.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    Easy answer is easy. Revenue is not the same as profit.
    - VeejayRampay 14y ago
      Point taken, profit is not revenue, you're absolutely right. Yet I looked the profit for VMWare for Q3 of 2012 and it's indicated that they made some 150 million dollars in Q3 of 2012. Then again, I am not an entrepreneur, sure, I might not understand all the details so this might be a bit naive but 150 million dollars in profit still seems like a good chunk of money and kind of clashes in my head with firing 900 people, the kind of situation I would expect if the company was bleeding money all over the place. Then I looked some more and found this and it got even more confusing: http://www.eweek.com/virtualization/vmware-q4-earnings-up-but-stock-slips-14-percent/ http://www.eweek.com/virtualization/vmware-q4-earnings-up-bu... From a noob outsider's point of view, it's almost as if the "value" of the company is not really correlated with its ability to make money and release good products, but on some decision from the market. And I guess this is where I (and most people who are not stock jockeys) completely lose track, where does that projection of what the earnings should be come from? How do people gauge that a quarter is a solid one or a bad one? Real question, any insight appreciated.
lquist 14y ago
Technical recruiter here. Just talked to VMWare recruiters that were interested in hiring as of last week. Doesn't mean that the story isn't true; just thought that I'd share.
skrebbel 14y ago
will they keep antirez on?
- account_taken 14y ago
  I was thinking the same. Long live Redis!
- antirez 14y ago
  Don't worry for Redis :-) Either some good company like VMware pays me to code it, or as long as it is very used as it is now, I'll learn how to pay my bills using Redis services or products. But one way or the other I'll continue to develop it full time as long as users like the final result and use it.
  - skrebbel 14y ago
    I'd like to say that I worried for you, not Redis, but honesty obliged me to admit that you're right. That said, it's cool that companies like VMware pay people like you to do the things that people like you do. It certainly gives VMware a few upvotes in my book.
    - antirez 14y ago
      Oh thank you! I hope I'll be able to maintain the current setup as it is perfect for me, my family, and Redis, but well I'm prepared to changes if it they'll be needed. Cheers
jadc 14y ago
Long time VMware employee here. While this is of course a sad event, it is not a reflection on the strength/weakness of VMware. Actually for a lot of my time here, we've had "carte blanche" in terms of hiring. The challenge was finding enough qualified people. I do think with the recent slew of acquisitions, the company may have grown too much too fast and is needing to reorganize hence this announcement. From what I heard, the company is still planning to grow its headcount in 2013 from where it is today. It is also engaged in a massive expansion project which will triple the size of the campus in Palo Alto. It would not be undertaking such a massive and costly effort if a permanent downsize is being envisaged.
- digitalengineer 14y ago
  When they bought SlideRocket it just fell dead in the water. Hell, I can't even add an RSS feed or embed some HTML. It's one of the top request from clients in the forum. (Paying client here. Sliderocket is great for out account managers doing presentations and keeping versions in sync).
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    They seem to be following an EMC playbook. Buy lots of corporations, shove them in and hope they work. Given that EMC has a fair amount of control over them in upper management, is it any wonder they are having, uh, growing pains?
  - jadc 14y ago
    Yeah agree that SlideRocket could be super useful. There was a lot of excitement internally at the company towards using it but after the first few tries, many have given up in frustration and reverted back to PowerPoint. I don't have any insight into the SlideRocket team to understand this lack of traction. My theory is that this was more of a whim acquisition on the part of the previous CEO and isn't going anywhere because it falls quite outside the core focus of the company.
    - digitalengineer 14y ago
contingencies 14y ago
Notice: Your job has just been virtualized.
garrynewman 14y ago
I tried to set our office servers up using VMWare virtualisation stuff a couple of months ago. It was a struggle finding out what I needed, then finding a way to pay for it, then finding out I'd bought the wrong thing. They have so many versions of the same product, slightly renamed, with slightly different features - which isn't totally apparent. They seem to have renamed products, but have the old version of the product next to the new version - so you don't exactly know they're different products. It seems to me that they could benefit a lot from slimming down and offering just 3 products - instead of the 100+ currently. I can't have been the only person totally confused by all of this - and ultimately it's got to be hurting more than it's gaining.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  When VMWare was forced into buying the EMC RMSG group, they took on board a whole bunch of disparate software suites they didn't know what to do with. Perhaps some history might help. EMC originally decided that as they were able to buy a lot of other storage companies and make these acquisitions work, they would do the same thing to be known as leaders in the "enterprise management" space - all so they could sell more storage. The market apparently was screaming out for a CMDB at the time, so their first acquisition was System Management Arts (SMARTS), which handled event management quite cleverly. Only... it didn't populate the CMDB as well as the market wanted, so EMC then decided to purchase nLayers, which was a network discovery appliance. Then they realised that network discovery alone does not make a CMDB. With this insight, they decided to buy infra, an Australian company that did IT Service Management, with a particular focus around the ITIL framework. Well what do you know, but Infra might do workflows and ticketing, but it doesn't actually control or automate actual configuration management. Thusly, they decided to remedy this by shortly thereafter purchasing Voyence. They actually bought a few more companies, but these were the main four. So at this point, you have at least four separate products, all developed on different architectures with different goals in mind, each of which wasn't talking to each other very well. SMARTS has its own proprietary scripting language and is built on a Java front end, with hooks into Perl. nLayers is a network appliance that runs on some sort of RedHat distribution and is put together with Perl, Apache, tcpdump and an inbuilt Oracle server. infra is a Windows based system that was, when they bought it, only jst running on .NET 2.0 and IIS, with SQL Server and Oracle back ends, with a front end based on (ugh) ActiveX. And Voyence... Well, not rightly sure what Voyence is built on. In other words, totally different development teams, all basically startups that were dynamic and successful in their own right, each having been shoe-horned into a massive hardware company that has no real clue about software or how to develop or support it, and each largely under the radar of the larger EMC. So they decide to write some "glue" software to allow all the discovery software to talk to each other. They call this DataCentre Insight (DCI). They have high hopes to do something, allow for mashups and REST based APIs. Well, this doesn't work. There are a lot of disgruntled employees because the RMSG group is so poorly run. A lot of these companies aren't based in Boston (in fact, they are often in different countries), but Boston decides it knows better how to run the companies. As is the way of these things, the clueless managers start strangling the life out of the smaller companies. Eventually, the guy who went on an acquisition spree, he "leaves". A new guy comes in. He decides to base the group around Infra, and rebadges all the product names to "Ionix" (rumour has it the original name was something else - Urinix - but Joe Tucci looked at in Word, found spell-checker came up with "urinate" as a suggestion and promptly nixed it). All brand awareness was dumped, nobody knew what suite was what and it was a marketing disaster. So then DCI was dumped, things kept going downhill, and eventually the new guy, along with another higher up brought in to fix the mess that was Ionix, stitched up a deal to foist the Ionix suite onto VMware. Of course, they keep SMARTS! Probably the best of the bunch because they needed it for certain storage technologies, like ControlCentre. Well, the VMware guys can't have been too impressed, especially given some of thir new offerings were going to overlap (such as with AppSpeed). After this point, no idea what happened. It was basically a big mess, caused by stupidity, cultural arrogance by a massive hardware company where cronyism was rife and innovation struggled. But it was largely caused by EMC management. There are, of course, a lot of other products in the VMware stable, but this should give you some insight into how EMC interferes in VMware. It's a pity, VMWare is a good company!
andyjohnson0 14y ago
According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Monday, the company will be making a "planned exit of certain business lines" Anyone care to speculate about what these business lines are? The virtual network tech acquired with Nicira ?
- vorg 14y ago
  I'd speculate they're selling SpringSource to maybe Oracle.
  - sc0rb 14y ago
    That would be very interesting given how JEE and Spring are so similar now. I would love Oracle to converge the both of them! I think the sale of SpringSource to Oracle is unlikely though.

84 points by ishbits 14y ago

this is why I don't work for mega software corps i bet all these poor bastard devs had to do 'team building exercises', file endless TPS reports, and forced to enjoy TGIF jeans day to indoctrinate you into the company cult then it's layoff time.

amitutk 14y ago
and small companies don't fire people?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - jonathanwallace 14y ago
    Small companies don't have to. They're small and the culture is immediately affected by the owners/founders/executive team directly.
- jussij 14y ago
  Small companies pay you less, make up the shortfall in stock options, work you longer hours and then go belly up ;)
- YZF 14y ago
  In big companies good people can end up being laid off because they happen to be in the wrong team/group/project and some clueless bean counter decides that's the business that needs to be eliminated. As far as large companies go it gets a lot worse than VMware though they seem to have lost direction somewhat. The problem of largeness is that decision makers are so far removed from the decision they can't possibly make good decisions. It's certainly possible for small companies to make bad decisions as well.
  - untog 14y ago
    In small companies good people can end up being laid off because they happen to not be buddy-buddy with their boss, and there's no oversight. Or because they aren't related to the owner. It cuts both ways, for sure.
  - kyrra 14y ago
    And at small companies, a boss may fire someone they just don't like personally. And not all bosses at small companies necessarily understand what their underlings do for a company. At big companies, if it is done right, the upper level management may ask for input from 1st line managers as to who they should fire. Also, my last company, all managers had to rank their underlings, and those at the bottom had a chance of being trimmed if there were layoffs. Many big companies will listen to those first line managers, and almost any upper-level manager is aware of their lack of knowledge about the leaves of the management tree.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Yes, you can be laid off from a small company because they lose one of their large clients for reasons that are absolutely nothing to do with you. They will then look to trim off "luxury expenses" and if they are not a tech company, having a full time IT/dev guy is likely to be one of them.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Employment is capricious in most situations. Large and small organizations can both have politics, can see drastic restructuring when business changes or a major client makes a change (drops a product, demands a change, ...). Large companies may insulate somewhat against capricious changes, though non-operational circumstances (particularly mismanagement or liquidity crunches of the holding corporation) can cause sudden and drastic changes (Borders, UAL, American Airlines). Small companies can have cash-flow issues as well. There's very little that's assured in life. Death and taxes you can count on.
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    > In big companies good people can end up being laid off because they happen to be in the wrong team/group/project and some clueless bean counter decides that's the business that needs to be eliminated. Why do they have to be clueless? Projects are never failures? They could cut a terrible project and still end up laying off good people. Is that a bad thing?
- ttar 14y ago
  I was fired from a startup, and I was their best developer. Needless to say, they are now going down. Making the engineering team political will doom any startup.
bitops 14y ago
In defense of VMware...I work at VMware and it's been great so far. At least in my division, there is very little "big company BS" to put up with. I've been here for a year and I've yet to file a single TPS report, attend a team building exercise, and they throw company-wide beer bashes every Friday (usually with pretty good food). It's a good place to work, in other words. Is it the same as a startup? Not at all. But if you're going to join a big company, you shouldn't be expecting that either.
m0nastic 14y ago
How many of these 900 jobs are developers? Not that I feel great about anyone losing their jobs, but it's hard to get a sense of what this means for VMWare without knowing their "restructuring plan". Are they HR department consolidations from acquisitions? Sales consolidations? There's a difference. I assume they're not replacing 900 software developers with virtualized developers who run just above the metal.
joshAg 14y ago
i work for riverbed. before their opnet acquisition in december they had about 1600 employees. now they have more, but i don't know if the new size is supposed to be public or not. my team building exercise was last week and it was 3.5 hours of go-karting in burlingame and a catered lunch. we had the rest of the day off. it was the first team building exercise my team did in my 12 months here, unless you count things like a halloween or christmas party. i've never had to do a tps report. the closest thing we have would be updating our internal wiki every week with a weekly status. we get to wear whatever the fuck we want. i got teased about going out for interviews when i wore a button-down shirt on laundry day instead of an ozzfest t-shirt with a massive screaming demon head on it (i thought it would be unprofessional; silly me). that's not to say that you get made fun of for wearing button-down shirts; i only did because i pretty much only wear t-shirts to work. i'd say about 3/4 of my team wears button-down shirts or the female equivalent. most people wear jeans. shorts are common in the summer. some people wear flip-flops year round. the idea that all big companies are going to be bad or even just worse than small companies is just silly. yes, there's shitty large companies, but there are also shitty small companies and shitty medium companies. but that's because of a bad or incompetent management team, not because of the size of the organization.
- chetanahuja 14y ago
  Heh... it's funny/nice to see someone mentioning riverbed as an example of a "big company". I laugh because I was there when 150 counted as a huge headcount and the SF office had to move to fremont street (and before there was a south bay office). I left when it rapidly grew to about 600 or so soon after the IPO.
  - joshAg 14y ago
    heh, i kind of know what you mean. I interned there in 2010, and then joined full time in jan 2012, and i was amazed how packed the sf office had become. now i work down in the new sv office, which has become nearly full within just a few months.
natural219 14y ago
Not at all. VMware was a great place to work for, at least the SpringSource division. Other than daily standups, about 90% of my time was spent doing just feature planning and development.

kyrra 14y ago

I don't believe these people are being fired... at least not all of them. Take a look at a report from 2 months ago[1]. 600 people from VMWare are working on Pivotal, if those people don't count on VMWare's books anymore, that would be a reduction in headcount. Also, the Chicago Tribune[2] article is better than the BizJournals one. One key point in this article is that by the end of 2013, they expect to hire 1000 new employees. This all sounds like shuffling around of people and trimming a little fat, and has nothing to do with VMWare possibly doing badly. [1] http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/12/05/vmware-confirms-pivotal-big-data-cloud-application-platform-spin-off/ http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/12/05/vmware-confirms-pivotal-... [2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-vmware-resultsbre90r139-20130128,0,1231388.story http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-vmware-resu...

kjackson2012 14y ago
In another article, they mentioned that they would be hiring as well, so they expect total headcount to be 1000 more than they have right now. They are doing a lot of expanding after they bought all the land around Hillsview, so it would be kind of bad if they started to cut really deeply, a lot of their buildings would be empty.
xorgar831 14y ago
Although Pivotal was being led by Martiz, who has left the company. https://blogs.vmware.com/console/2012/12/the-pivotal-initiative.html https://blogs.vmware.com/console/2012/12/the-pivotal-initiat... EDIT: Although he's now the Chief Strategy Officer at EMC, so maybe that's good. http://www.emc.com/corporate/emc-at-glance/exec-team/index.htm http://www.emc.com/corporate/emc-at-glance/exec-team/index.h...

kjackson2012 14y ago

I shorted VMW just before the close today via puts. It was only 2 contracts and the strike price was at $90. I was going to bet more, I usually go in a position with 10 contracts, but I have some financial obligations coming up so I didn't want to risk too much. I have a few friends that work there. They are happy, but they say that the company lacks any sense of urgency. After Maritz left and more recently Steve Herrod, there seems to be a dearth of really brilliant and inspirational people in the top positions. A lot of great engineers were lost after the 4 year post-IPO options expiration came due last year. As well, there is a lot of middle management, and lots of politics, and apparently lots of fat-cat principal engineers that stick around and do not very much. All of this spells a recipe for stagnation. The debacle over the last year or so with licensing only cemented the idea that ESX is expensive, and Hyper-V is getting to "good enough" status.

vorg 14y ago
> As well, there is a lot of middle management, and lots of politics, and apparently lots of fat-cat principal engineers that stick around and do not very much. With the firings-by-another-name coming up, expect the politics to get nastier. We'll see the middle managers who don't do very much to turn on the ones that do, leaving an even greater dearth of brilliant coders.
beedogs 14y ago
Go figure; company goes public, company goes stagnant. Seems like a common theme in the industry.
- tedunangst 14y ago
  Counting the EMC years, VMWare has been public for more than half its existence. By your assessment, it's been stagnant since before most people even heard of it.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    Remove the EMC years then...

maerek 14y ago

I'm curious what business lines are being trimmed, as referenced in the article. What other lines of business (the phrasing makes me think this is externally facing business, not internal departments) is VMware involved in beyond the core virtualization biz?

klearvue 14y ago
Zimbra is one.

n0mad01 14y ago

i cannot believe it. > projecting revenue in the range of $1.17 billion to $1.19 > billion, compared with $1.25 billion expected by analysts. > VMWare shares fell 15 percent they're still talking about 1.2 BILLION in revenue. it's never enough ...

VeejayRampay 14y ago
Yeah that's why that whole "job creators" / "we built this" routine doesn't really register with me. Let's call it what it really is, an extremely well-designed (I have to recognize) machine to generate as much money while employing as few people as possible to maximize profit. Now what they're doing with all that cash, I'm still wondering to this day. If someone has a sensible answer to that question I'd be really interested in understanding the rationale. And this is a serious question, since I always thought that laying off people was a last resort type of strategy. EDIT: Rephrased to be less inflammatory and more open to discussion.
- tedunangst 14y ago
  Easy answer is easy. Revenue is not the same as profit.
  - VeejayRampay 14y ago
    Point taken, profit is not revenue, you're absolutely right. Yet I looked the profit for VMWare for Q3 of 2012 and it's indicated that they made some 150 million dollars in Q3 of 2012. Then again, I am not an entrepreneur, sure, I might not understand all the details so this might be a bit naive but 150 million dollars in profit still seems like a good chunk of money and kind of clashes in my head with firing 900 people, the kind of situation I would expect if the company was bleeding money all over the place. Then I looked some more and found this and it got even more confusing: http://www.eweek.com/virtualization/vmware-q4-earnings-up-but-stock-slips-14-percent/ http://www.eweek.com/virtualization/vmware-q4-earnings-up-bu... From a noob outsider's point of view, it's almost as if the "value" of the company is not really correlated with its ability to make money and release good products, but on some decision from the market. And I guess this is where I (and most people who are not stock jockeys) completely lose track, where does that projection of what the earnings should be come from? How do people gauge that a quarter is a solid one or a bad one? Real question, any insight appreciated.

lquist 14y ago

Technical recruiter here. Just talked to VMWare recruiters that were interested in hiring as of last week. Doesn't mean that the story isn't true; just thought that I'd share.

skrebbel 14y ago

will they keep antirez on?

account_taken 14y ago
I was thinking the same. Long live Redis!
antirez 14y ago
Don't worry for Redis :-) Either some good company like VMware pays me to code it, or as long as it is very used as it is now, I'll learn how to pay my bills using Redis services or products. But one way or the other I'll continue to develop it full time as long as users like the final result and use it.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  I'd like to say that I worried for you, not Redis, but honesty obliged me to admit that you're right. That said, it's cool that companies like VMware pay people like you to do the things that people like you do. It certainly gives VMware a few upvotes in my book.
  - antirez 14y ago
    Oh thank you! I hope I'll be able to maintain the current setup as it is perfect for me, my family, and Redis, but well I'm prepared to changes if it they'll be needed. Cheers

jadc 14y ago

Long time VMware employee here. While this is of course a sad event, it is not a reflection on the strength/weakness of VMware. Actually for a lot of my time here, we've had "carte blanche" in terms of hiring. The challenge was finding enough qualified people. I do think with the recent slew of acquisitions, the company may have grown too much too fast and is needing to reorganize hence this announcement. From what I heard, the company is still planning to grow its headcount in 2013 from where it is today. It is also engaged in a massive expansion project which will triple the size of the campus in Palo Alto. It would not be undertaking such a massive and costly effort if a permanent downsize is being envisaged.

digitalengineer 14y ago
When they bought SlideRocket it just fell dead in the water. Hell, I can't even add an RSS feed or embed some HTML. It's one of the top request from clients in the forum. (Paying client here. Sliderocket is great for out account managers doing presentations and keeping versions in sync).
- chris_wot 14y ago
  They seem to be following an EMC playbook. Buy lots of corporations, shove them in and hope they work. Given that EMC has a fair amount of control over them in upper management, is it any wonder they are having, uh, growing pains?
- jadc 14y ago
  Yeah agree that SlideRocket could be super useful. There was a lot of excitement internally at the company towards using it but after the first few tries, many have given up in frustration and reverted back to PowerPoint. I don't have any insight into the SlideRocket team to understand this lack of traction. My theory is that this was more of a whim acquisition on the part of the previous CEO and isn't going anywhere because it falls quite outside the core focus of the company.
  - digitalengineer 14y ago

contingencies 14y ago

Notice: Your job has just been virtualized.

garrynewman 14y ago

I tried to set our office servers up using VMWare virtualisation stuff a couple of months ago. It was a struggle finding out what I needed, then finding a way to pay for it, then finding out I'd bought the wrong thing. They have so many versions of the same product, slightly renamed, with slightly different features - which isn't totally apparent. They seem to have renamed products, but have the old version of the product next to the new version - so you don't exactly know they're different products. It seems to me that they could benefit a lot from slimming down and offering just 3 products - instead of the 100+ currently. I can't have been the only person totally confused by all of this - and ultimately it's got to be hurting more than it's gaining.

chris_wot 14y ago
When VMWare was forced into buying the EMC RMSG group, they took on board a whole bunch of disparate software suites they didn't know what to do with. Perhaps some history might help. EMC originally decided that as they were able to buy a lot of other storage companies and make these acquisitions work, they would do the same thing to be known as leaders in the "enterprise management" space - all so they could sell more storage. The market apparently was screaming out for a CMDB at the time, so their first acquisition was System Management Arts (SMARTS), which handled event management quite cleverly. Only... it didn't populate the CMDB as well as the market wanted, so EMC then decided to purchase nLayers, which was a network discovery appliance. Then they realised that network discovery alone does not make a CMDB. With this insight, they decided to buy infra, an Australian company that did IT Service Management, with a particular focus around the ITIL framework. Well what do you know, but Infra might do workflows and ticketing, but it doesn't actually control or automate actual configuration management. Thusly, they decided to remedy this by shortly thereafter purchasing Voyence. They actually bought a few more companies, but these were the main four. So at this point, you have at least four separate products, all developed on different architectures with different goals in mind, each of which wasn't talking to each other very well. SMARTS has its own proprietary scripting language and is built on a Java front end, with hooks into Perl. nLayers is a network appliance that runs on some sort of RedHat distribution and is put together with Perl, Apache, tcpdump and an inbuilt Oracle server. infra is a Windows based system that was, when they bought it, only jst running on .NET 2.0 and IIS, with SQL Server and Oracle back ends, with a front end based on (ugh) ActiveX. And Voyence... Well, not rightly sure what Voyence is built on. In other words, totally different development teams, all basically startups that were dynamic and successful in their own right, each having been shoe-horned into a massive hardware company that has no real clue about software or how to develop or support it, and each largely under the radar of the larger EMC. So they decide to write some "glue" software to allow all the discovery software to talk to each other. They call this DataCentre Insight (DCI). They have high hopes to do something, allow for mashups and REST based APIs. Well, this doesn't work. There are a lot of disgruntled employees because the RMSG group is so poorly run. A lot of these companies aren't based in Boston (in fact, they are often in different countries), but Boston decides it knows better how to run the companies. As is the way of these things, the clueless managers start strangling the life out of the smaller companies. Eventually, the guy who went on an acquisition spree, he "leaves". A new guy comes in. He decides to base the group around Infra, and rebadges all the product names to "Ionix" (rumour has it the original name was something else - Urinix - but Joe Tucci looked at in Word, found spell-checker came up with "urinate" as a suggestion and promptly nixed it). All brand awareness was dumped, nobody knew what suite was what and it was a marketing disaster. So then DCI was dumped, things kept going downhill, and eventually the new guy, along with another higher up brought in to fix the mess that was Ionix, stitched up a deal to foist the Ionix suite onto VMware. Of course, they keep SMARTS! Probably the best of the bunch because they needed it for certain storage technologies, like ControlCentre. Well, the VMware guys can't have been too impressed, especially given some of thir new offerings were going to overlap (such as with AppSpeed). After this point, no idea what happened. It was basically a big mess, caused by stupidity, cultural arrogance by a massive hardware company where cronyism was rife and innovation struggled. But it was largely caused by EMC management. There are, of course, a lot of other products in the VMware stable, but this should give you some insight into how EMC interferes in VMware. It's a pity, VMWare is a good company!

andyjohnson0 14y ago

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Monday, the company will be making a "planned exit of certain business lines" Anyone care to speculate about what these business lines are? The virtual network tech acquired with Nicira ?

vorg 14y ago
I'd speculate they're selling SpringSource to maybe Oracle.
- sc0rb 14y ago
  That would be very interesting given how JEE and Spring are so similar now. I would love Oracle to converge the both of them! I think the sale of SpringSource to Oracle is unlikely though.