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It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

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Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#131

Post by Youden »

dbspin wrote: post #127
smallnamespace wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiny nitpick: complement means a good in an adjacent part of the supply chain (e.g. batteries and EVs are complements), you might have meant 'competitors'.

From the point of view of a customer, a complementary service would be a product that fits the same niche and is reasonably substitutable.

English is a living language so it's impossible to say definitively that you're "wrong" but I don't think anyone else is able to understand what you're trying to communicate through your use of this word.

According to the Cambridge dictionary, there are a couple of variants depending on your dialect:

- "to make something else seem better or more attractive when combining with it" - e.g. "Strawberries and cream complement each other perfectly."

- "to help make something or someone more complete or effective" - e.g. "She used photographs to complement the text of the news story. "

The only way I can make any sense of your words is to assume you're trying to argue that two competing but interchangeable services "complement" each other when used simultaneously because that might allow a customer to mitigate risk in a similar fashion to a multi-cloud setup. That's a pretty big jump to make from what you've actually said though and would really need further explanation for anyone to understand.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#132

Post by alephnerd »

nunez wrote: post #120

There are lots of details missing. VMware had a crazy amount of product and support SKUs. It is possible that they were vastly underpaying relative to what they should have been licensed for. Also, 24k VMs is a lot but core count is what matters. They could have been running that compute with insane overprovisioning, and Broadcom generally wants customers with REALLY HIGH core counts. Finally, the new SKUs that Broad…

> There are lots of details missing

It's a submarine article from Nutanix .NEXT who seemed to have done a media buy with The Register.

I've always detested that kind of underhanded vendor tactic, and am honestly happy that giants like ZScaler and Palo Alto Networks are moving away from the conferences+trade rag GTM and moving towards either direct sales or more targeted usergroups+conferences (eg. BSides).

> Broadcom is not joking about wanting to cull the herd here

Yep! Niklesh did the same thing to turn around PANW, and imo VMWare kinda needs it. The products are good, but it seemed like a lot of shenanigans were happening at the AE level.

I've heard down the grapevine that there's a significant shift towards cloud security now, which I think is something VMWare really needed to do - they had the right products, but became addicted to on-prem cash cows.

Either become a PANW or become a Rackspace.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#133

Post by red-iron-pine »

p_l wrote: post #50
alephnerd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broadcom makes $35B a year in revenue. VMWare made at most $13.4B. Even with severe churn, VMWare would make around $12.8-13B. VMWare is just a BU now, not a company, and the economics of managing "just another product line" is different from a company with a flagship product As I've mentioned before on HN, the math is different and it makes sense to up prices and only concentrate on F1000s at that size. > Pinning al…

Large customers also can have resources to simultaneously negotiate you on price while starting 3 initiatives to "remove vmware ASAP". F1000 can have sticker price shocks and sensitivity too, especially if you happen to raise your prices soon after other events that might have made them look into cost savings...

I was an infrastructure architect at a F50, and I'm sure they'd have been quite sensitive to the changes. Like, once we got a confirmation of new pricing, the day after we're kicking off a Discovery process to find and cost out some alternatives.

They were, and I'm guessing still are, also very resistant to SaaS / IaaS plays, for a lot of (arguably) good reasons, and I'm not sure what they'd go with as an alternative. OpenShift? Raw dog some DIY docker clusters?

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#134

Post by buggeryorkshire »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #66
bombcar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4x and in one go is too much for many to bear. If you do it at 25%-50% a year or so you can boil the frog with much more reliability. Everyone and everything is replaceable. The question is if it’s worth it.

A shakedown price increase means that your vendor isn't your partner. Because major vendors are business partners. It's like blackmail. If you pay up, how do you know another one isn't coming the next year? But... Oracle stays in business, so what do I know.

Exactly. I do not know how what is happening with VMware didn't happen to Oracle years ago, apart from them being a legal firm with a tech product attached.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#135

Post by buggeryorkshire »

hnbear wrote: post #41
alephnerd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not snarky and they very gladly work with corporates as well. Look at all the sponsored content they have from ZTE, as well as all the Nutanix specific articles because of Nutanix .NEXT Snark is fine if you are evenhanded by being snarky about everyone, but it ain't great if you're clearly picking and choosing and deciding to take money from vendors.

They lost the fun snark and just went pissy and needlessly edgelordy 10 years ago. It’s not the great site it was in the 90s anymore when it was fair, balanced and fun, along with having accurate news.

Yep. They're not a must read like they were then, and like Computer Weekly were in the 90s, but I'm still glad they're around to provide slight balance to all the regurgitated press releases.

Mike McGee was a legend.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#136

Post by bombcar »

buggeryorkshire wrote: post #134
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A shakedown price increase means that your vendor isn't your partner. Because major vendors are business partners. It's like blackmail. If you pay up, how do you know another one isn't coming the next year? But... Oracle stays in business, so what do I know.

Exactly. I do not know how what is happening with VMware didn't happen to Oracle years ago, apart from them being a legal firm with a tech product attached.

Because Oracle does have an actual product and team that is actually skilled and delivers what they promise. Sure, there are competitors that might do similar, but they also cost a pretty penny.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#137

Post by illiac786 »

alephnerd wrote: post #21
pmx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This massively increases risk too, right? Pinning all your revenue on a much smaller customer base means losing one or two of them has a huge impact!

Broadcom makes $35B a year in revenue. VMWare made at most $13.4B. Even with severe churn, VMWare would make around $12.8-13B. VMWare is just a BU now, not a company, and the economics of managing "just another product line" is different from a company with a flagship product As I've mentioned before on HN, the math is different and it makes sense to up prices and only concentrate on F1000s at that size. > Pinning al…

> Large customers are sticky.

Many vendors confuse inertia for stickiness. Large customers are slow. But like super tanker they are very hard to course correct once you send them one. Course you don’t like.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#138

Post by JeremyNT »

alephnerd wrote: post #111
JeremyNT wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. It can be all of the above though. I work in higher education and Proxmox is the only option we are seriously considering right now.

Fair point. I was thinking solely from a Upper Market perspective. Higher Ed is in a weird place where budgets are small but the personnel are fairly adept, so depending on the size you guys could actually be a good fit for deploying and managing a FOSS offering like Proxmox.

You're right on the money. The magic of VMWare before is that it did enough for a low enough cost that it made sense for all sorts of orgs, even those that were quite cost sensitive.

But higher ed is weird for the reasons you mention.

To elaborate a bit: before commercialization, universities were a huge part of the early internet, and they invested heavily in datacenters and connectivity at a time when "the cloud" didn't exist.

They also have weird cost models and paying for power/cooling is sometimes done in a way that IT doesn't even account for that burden at all.

So to a large degree, shutting down on-prem stuff to move to "the cloud" has never made financial sense for unis, and they've always had to adapt to whatever datacenter tech has been required over the long decades.

That means they're staffed with people who never forgot how to run workloads directly on the metal, and aren't afraid to build it themselves rather than just move to a vendor. When it comes to the VMWare / Broadcom situation, "once bitten, twice shy" is going to be in the back of their minds - they know they'll be around for decades to come, and nobody wants to have to migrate early due to another rug pull.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#139

Post by nottorp »

alephnerd wrote: post #13
nottorp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hate they're speaking as (very snarky) humans? Corporate speak is better?

They are not snarky and they very gladly work with corporates as well. Look at all the sponsored content they have from ZTE, as well as all the Nutanix specific articles because of Nutanix .NEXT Snark is fine if you are evenhanded by being snarky about everyone, but it ain't great if you're clearly picking and choosing and deciding to take money from vendors.

Mind that i said 'corporate speak' as referring to the tone of the articles. Not referring to who they do or don't take money from...

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#140

Post by mindcrash »

And Nutanix is working incredibly great (although that is not a big surprise considering it is "just" KVM with heavy modifications), I recently finished a small consulting gig at a SMB making the jump from VMWare to Nutanix.

It would not surprise me that soon Broadcom will realize they purchased a dead company, because according to my contacts at Nutanix the OP is not an edge case and small and large companies are migrating from VMWare to Nutanix and/or other solutions such as OpenStack in droves.

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