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Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

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Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#171

Post by hnarn »

squarefoot wrote: post #137
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…

> Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly? Not just Linux but IT in general. It may have to be about security; my impression is that at least some of the widespread successful attacks in recent years might have been prevented if non IT companies had their own IT department, servers and in house security teams. Relying on an external provider is cheap and comfortable, until the day a single vulnerability screw…

> if non IT companies had their own IT department

I think you vastly underestimate the cost of on-prem IT, especially for small and medium sized businesses. The "floor" cost of your own IT is many, many orders of magnitude higher than a subscription to something like Office 365 for something like 50 people.

"Normal" people don't use cloud services because they're lazy, they do it because the economics of rolling your own IT does not make sense, and hasn't since the days when it stopped being your only option.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#172

Post by captaincaveman »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #99
AndrewStephens wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maaaaaybe. I am not a fan of software patents but intellectual property laws are the only thing stopping Big Company A from just cloning Small Company B's product. At least now they have to go to the trouble of buying them. Of course, it goes both ways and laws often favor the strong against the weak. But it is not all one-sided.

Wasn't there a whole thing about big tech companies interviewing small companies as if to acquire them and then just cloning the product anyways?

Most small companies don't have patents, or ones that matter.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#173

Post by dangerboysteve »

mrweasel wrote: post #105
999900000999 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels way too pessimistic, VMware got big before open source virtualization took off. I imagine someone could use docker instead of VMware in most cases, and if that's not possible then hire some people to make it so. Vendor lockin is a scary thing, the people who are really going to hurt here are mega super corps who are now going to have to pay out the nose. If you're a smaller company, you should be moving to…

VMware has a ton of product, none of them really competes with Docker. They do have Tanzu I suppose, but that more a Kubernetes offering. I would argue that there are more Docker containers running on a VM, running on top of VMware than there are Docker containers running on bare metal servers. Both VMs and containers can be used and misused in a number of ways, but rarely can you replace a VM on VMware ESXi with Doc…

Citrix Xenserver is now called Citrix Hypervisor and there was also a fork of Xenserver by a French company called Vates and they have an opensource version called XCP-NG. Vates offer support and other addons.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#174

Post by parkingrift »

ronnier wrote: post #113
formerly_proven wrote: post #3

Can we like... stop building these ginormous conglomerates? Thanks.

We can but asia won’t. We can stop and let Asian tech giants eat us alive.

You're saying "Asia" but you're really referring to China.

There is no reason for the west to allow Chinese companies to compete in their markets. Reciprocal market access or no access at all.

If western trade agreements forbid companies of a certain size from selling locally there is no alternative for Asian companies but to split or exit the market. We aren't helpless passengers on a worldwide economic joyride.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#175

Post by andyjohnson0 »

technion wrote: post #33
SSLy wrote: post #4

Oh no https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/uxucz4/if_vm...

It's relevant that they are talking about VMware's security portfolio. The vast majority of why people are VMware proponents is down to their virtualisation software. It's why we were big resellers for a while. But for the last few years, their own sales people have only wanted to talk about security products, quite plainly acknowledging stagnant growth in on premise virtualisation. But virtualisation is in my view t…

This. Virtualisation has been commodified - cloud, kubernetes, docker, hyper-v, even virtualbox. Whereas securing a decade's worth of on-prem infrastructure is a real pain-point for enterprises.

VMware Workstation blew my mind when I saw it demoed in (I think) mid-2000 [1]. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was seeing - it seemed that revolutionary, running an OS inside an OS on a desktop. I wonder whether VMware's problem nowadays is that, having basically invented the technology, they've become almost synonymous with the category of virtualisation tech - kind of like "Hoover" for home appliances - and their other products get less attention.

(I know that VMware didn't invent the idea of virtual machines. But my perception is that at that time, virtualised OSs were mostly found in mainframes.)

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#176

Post by geodel »

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

Yeah, a lot of companies which are raising world's consciousness wouldn't buy the grubby enterprise software.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#177

Post by hnarn »

acd wrote: post #37

Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel based virtual machines.

> Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud.

This is something that the HN crowd repeats as if it were an obvious axiom where no scrutiny is needed. While I'm sure it's true that there's a general movement towards cloud-based infrastructure, there is a very real and non-trivial part of the IT infrastructure of any country that will not move to the cloud in the coming decade, if it ever will. This general movement is not the same thing as "everything will eventually have moved".

The hypothesis that on-site virtualization somehow is an obviously dying technology assumes that it must be true that on-site hosting will stop existing, which I have a very hard time believing. If nothing else (and there are plenty of "elses"), strict data security and privacy concerns will keep on-site hosting moated for a long time.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#178

Post by bonzini »

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

Hire one person less and you've already broken even. Applies just the same to to any managed service on the cloud, to Outlook365 instead of your own email server, etc.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#179

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #138
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness, like AWS. This is how I feel about most B2B companies and software. I wonder how a recession and the end of free funny money will change that whole sector?

Would you consider a chef who buys produce from the market as opposed to buying a farm and growing it on their own "stupid and lazy"?

It’s more like being a chef and paying another company to cut up your ingredients for you and cook them.

Companies these days just want to specialize in making cool menu designs and marketing and waiting on the three star Michelin review to roll in somehow.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#180

Post by rootusrootus »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #119
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…

Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness, like AWS. This is how I feel about most B2B companies and software. I wonder how a recession and the end of free funny money will change that whole sector?

If you're right, then this looks like a great opportunity to outcompete these dumb, lazy companies that don't know how to run a business.
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