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Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

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Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#161

Post by jhickok »

throwaway19423 wrote: post #130
numlocked wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the 37 year old CTO and co-founder of a company that pays VMWare something like that per year because we need an endpoint management solution. We have a strong engineering team but that certainly isn’t something we are going to build ourselves. VMWare is not just virtualization.

I'm in a senior position but not CEO. I'd pay VMware for virtualization as it just works compared to the complexity of opensource solutions. For endpoint mgmt, I'm curious about your use case? Is it about managing virtual endpoints in the cloud, on-prem servers (physical or virtual) or are you talking about laptops/workstations?

VMware purchased Airwatch, perhaps the premiere mobile device management suite.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#162

Post by yobbo »

ghc wrote: post #84
unabridged wrote: post #52

Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them. Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Sinc…

> but needs software to run its business

In this case, they have no need for VMWare or Oracle.

Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to, which allows them to float through their careers fairly unchallenged.

At one point in time, IBM had this market position. Then Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon and Google.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#163

Post by hnarn »

sbf501 wrote: post #139
boeingUH60 wrote: post #10

Michael Dell will get $24bn! from this acquisition...It's fascinating how he turned around a struggling PC company (Dell Inc) into a financial engineering machine that made him tens of billions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/18/how-wall...

But did he know EMC's ownership of VMWare in 2016 was going to turn out to be such a stellar cloud performer, or was that just IP portfolio luck?

The VMWare market cap in 2016 was ~$32B, of course there's no objective way to answer your question definitely as yes or no but I'd say that VMWare was already at that point more than comfortably a more or less de-facto standard for virtualization.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#164

Post by dangerboysteve »

mrweasel wrote: post #112
unabridged wrote: post #52

Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

We did the math at my previous employer. The cost of running OpenStack, in terms of training and day to day operations was higher than just paying VMware their licens fee. We even had a guy from RedHat help us do the cost analysis, didn't matter, cheaper to just pay VMware. This didn't even include the cost of doing the migration. I can't imagine it being cheaper to build everything yourself on top of just plain KVM,…

Also factor in the people trained to use VMware. There is always a pool of individuals to hire.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#165

Post by jnovek »

yobbo wrote: post #140
jjice wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. If these (and the endless examples of paying profe…

> I pay a barber to cut my hair. Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies: Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant. You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you ne…

I lease a car every four years in part so that I don’t have to deal with the inevitable car repairs that come after that point.

For some — but not all — people, that’s a preferable option.

For some — but not all — companies, enterprise tech is a preferable option.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#166

Post by elzbardico »

unabridged wrote: post #52

Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

Legacy. Interoperability with other similar companies. Manpower requirements (far easier to onboard a junior developer with boring technologies)

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#167

Post by numlocked »

sbf501 wrote: post #143
numlocked wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the 37 year old CTO and co-founder of a company that pays VMWare something like that per year because we need an endpoint management solution. We have a strong engineering team but that certainly isn’t something we are going to build ourselves. VMWare is not just virtualization.

Grove.co is a great example because it is totally not a software company. Is your role as CTO primarily the ERP & storefront, or just one or the other? I'm not following what you mean by endpoint (other than "storefront" because ERP would all be a SaaS right?)

Storefront. We have our own headless e-commerce platform, with iOS, Android, and Web clients. We also have our own order management system that mediates between storefront and our ERP (which is commercial SaaS). And a handful of other smaller applications for everything from outbound carrier rate card testing, to customer service tooling & automation (integrated with ZenDesk) and all sorts of other bits and bobs like ETL code, integration layers, marketing tools, etc, etc. We should not have quite this much custom software, but it takes time to migrate the non-strategic sub-systems to commercial solutions — and even then you’d be surprised how much custom software we DO actually need in a business like this.

My role also encompasses many “CIO-like” functions, but my area of expertise is in application development and I look to hire strong leaders in the other areas (or move certain tech domains entirely into other functions — eg our warehouse management system lives within our operations group, and me and my team help in an advisory capacity but don’t “own” the budget or WMS strategy).

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#168

Post by ghaff »

nimbius wrote: post #148
ghc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them. Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Sinc…

but thats just it, this argument only ever works if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing. You make eggs, and your target fixation only allows you to see eggs, so these companies hold some mysterious value to you. KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory mi…

>if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing

I don't except to the degree that the product is more or less suitable for my business needs. And note I said product, which KVM by itself is not. If I'm going to use KVM--and, yes, I likely would rather than VMware unless I otherwise needed VMware for some reason--I'd be buying it as part of a supported commercial Linux distribution.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#169

Post by rwmj »

jka wrote: post #149

For anyone curious about potential open-source migration options given the prospect of uncertainty around VMware pricing and support: - xcp-ng[1] is a support-available fork of XenServer. Migration[2] can be performed using export to OVA format and subsequent import into the built-in Xen-Orchestra interface. - proxmox-ve[3] provides a management UI for Linux Virtual Machine (LVM) and Linux Containers (LXC) hosts and…

virt-v2v can import VMs from VMware to QEMU/KVM-based systems. https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#170

Post by hnarn »

yobbo wrote: post #162
ghc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them. Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Sinc…

> but needs software to run its business In this case, they have no need for VMWare or Oracle. Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to, which allows them to float through their careers fairly unchallenged. At one point in time, IBM had this market position. Then Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon and Google.

> Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to

Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable?

If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that businesses buying the Google Apps suite is nonsensical, because the only reason you'd ever use Google is because you're a "careerist" that "only know" Google.

That's obviously not true, Gmail and the rest of the Google suite have been market-leading for many years, because they are good solutions that solve real problems. Presumably the same thing goes for the Microsoft Office suite, and so on.

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