141–150 of 151 posts
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wasn't Next actually developed by the former CEO of Apple as well?
Yes, Steve Jobs was CEO of Next when they got bought
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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.
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From the point of view of a customer, a complementary service would be a product that fits the same niche and is reasonably substitutable.
FYI in modern microeconomics, 'substitute' and 'complement' are precisely defined terms that have opposite meanings.
I don't think I've ever seen to this degree such a misguided focus on short-term profit at the expense of driving away ALL future customers. At this point, who ever would even consider VMware for a new project or business? Vmware will exist only as long as their current customers exist. Being a VMware salesperson has to be a brutal job right now.
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> Large customers are sticky. You can't migrate your hypervisor or cloud provider overnight. These are multi-year projects. Yes, but that scale, everything is an multi-year effort. The contracts likely as well. That doesn't mean, it's not going to happen. And it's not like all has to happen in one go. So before you were all in VMware, and that vendor is practically promising to hike up the prices to make you bleed. W…
Also, where are ESXI customers at the enterprise level going to go? Do we really think they're going to magically switch over to HyperV (and get Win admins) or Proxmox (and have a lack of IBM-enterprise level support)?
Haven't worked yet with IBM, but if they are of equal level, then I'd rather avoid them.
But since you say IBM, they have IBM Cloud Manager, and through Redhat also an Openstack offer, and with Openshift a K8S offer. Various vendors offer either or both.
There are also companies which operate internal cloud providers for other companies. Various public cloud providers offer you to operate your datacenter with their API in-hose.
Yes, it comes with their hardware, but guess what, in three years chances are half of your hardware is deprecated and has been replaced anyway.
Yes, all that requires effort. Considerable effort. But it is a one-time effort (i.e. fixed costs) compared to a X-fold increase of licensing costs. So, you look at the ROI, consider the risk of having that degree of exposure, and guess what...
To reiterate: It doesn't have to be all in one go, it doesn't mean it has to be all of it. Maybe some of your payload will always stay on vmware, but thinking you can ask the big companies for 20x the license costs, and expect 20x the revenue is rather odd.
You may guess, where I know that from.
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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…
I don't know where exactly in spending bracket my current $DAYJOB fits, but I did hear both about negotiating prices with Broadcom and grumbles of looking for replacement including accelerating movement to AWS where possible.
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FYI in modern microeconomics, 'substitute' and 'complement' are precisely defined terms that have opposite meanings.
This is interesting. In university, I was taught that a substitute product would be an alternative choice (eg. Nathan's hotdogs vs Ball park franks) and complimentary products were ones that typically "moved" together (eg. Nathan's hotdogs and ketchup). So not really opposite unless you are talking about price vs demand.
Substitute goods have negatively correlated demand, while complementary ones have demand that positively correlate. A simple criterion, at least in theory. You will buy more ketchup when you buy more franks, but you will buy fewer hot dogs.
And it's also close enough to the MBA definition of complement (of "commoditize your complement" fame).
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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…
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> Even with severe churn, VMWare would make around $12.8-13B. Down from the $13.4B -- that's not 'severe churn' you're describing there, it implies only a few percent drop in revenue. We've yet to see if that's the likely outcome here, but touchy-feely sentiment suggests that it'll be worse than that. > Large customers are sticky. Isn't TFA a precise counter-point to that assumption?
> that's not 'severe churn' Companies do not churn 100% customers. Most cases "severe churn" is counted as 80-100% NRR as customers are on multiyear contracts that are much more expensive to break than they are to wait out. > Isn't TFA a precise counter-point to that assumption? The customer was already a Nutanix customer, so the hard work was already done. Basically, this customer was using BOTH Nutanix and VMWare i…
You've said 'severe churn is 80-100% NRR' in one message, but in another that 'severe churn' would involve only a difference from 13.4b down to 12.8 - 13.0b (vmware / broadcom revenue).
You've said that it's foolish to have two hypervisors in play in an org, because then you're doubling up on SMEs for hypervisor infrastructure.
Computershare's revenue last FY was 3.2b -- and as per TFA they were running 24,000 VMware VMs (one can only speculate on the Nutanix VM count) -- so it seems reasonable that they'd have sufficient baseload of SMEs to split across two technologies without sending the company under. Given their YoY revenue increase from the previous year, it evidently wasn't a constraint.
You've said that multi-cloud is different (more acceptable / forgivable) to multi-hypervisor for three reasons:
a) different billing mechanisms
b) migration is baked into cloud services
c) cloud budgets come under R&D rather than finance / IT
You have not addressed that multi-cloud has the same two problems you accuse multi-hypervisor of suffering - a requirement for multiple sets of differently skilled SMEs, and 2x contract negotiations.
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…