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Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

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Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#191

Post by adrr »

indymike wrote: post #185
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? Um... perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines.

If you think there is efficiency gains in terms of cost savings. Why don't you do a startup to try to go after the enterprise software market? We spend millions on ERP, PLM, SCM,WMS, etc. We would gladly move to cheaper solutions that offered the same feature sets. I don't have choice about VMWare because a bunch of software requires on-prem hosting due to latency(need sub 10ms for sensors) and the software is built on top of windows.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#192

Post by rosege »

hnarn wrote: post #163
sbf501 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but there was a big shift away from virtualization to cloud and micro services. As a former VMware admin I'm surprised VMware is doing as well as they are now. But maybe my view is just shaded by the bank I was working for that was moving away from it to AWS.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#193

Post by eatYourFood »

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…

lulwut?

I've got several clients that pay over 500k/year to a SaaS ERP vendor. The ERP system is the very definition of enterprise software.

What would you suggest I advise my clients when it comes to their finance, inventory, order management, logistics etc?

I guess they could piece together various SaaS solutions to create some sort of composable microservice based system to meet their needs but that's a massive engineering overhead when they can just get all of the functionality they need on one big fat enterprise ERP system.

The cosmetics manufacturer I work with does not care about what the technologists (people like you and me) care about. They just want to run their manufacturing and wholesale operation and if Oracle are offering one system that does it all, why wouldn't they take that deal?

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#194

Post by strunz »

xadhominemx wrote: post #26
nikanj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they want something that’s not affected by the chip shortage.

No, that is just incorrect. Please don’t speculate if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

This was reported by multiple financial news organizations, what makes you so confident it isn't true?

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#195

Post by gautamdivgi »

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

Newer companies don't deal with Linux directly either. The vast majority use managed cloud services (kubernetes, containers, serverless, managed databases, etc.). For all practical purposes - most of the start-up players use "enterprise software" as well. It's just different enterprises.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#196

Post by vkat »

For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares.

Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects.

Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#197

Post by mvdwoord »

999900000999 wrote: post #72
SSLy wrote: post #4

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

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…

Ever tried to manage 50.000 production vms? Whith a mix of applications which cannot be easily containerized... Vcenter, vrops, NSX, etc . You could reinvent, build in house. Or you can buy VMware with support. What would the regulator prefer?

But, this does offer incentive for outsiders to create competitive stacks.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#198

Post by hnarn »

yobbo wrote: post #181
hnarn wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 busi…

People are now starting careers as Office 365 "officers". From now until retirement, they will champion Office 365 and its successors in all situations, because in effect they will be championing their own CVs. Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on. If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365 makes no difference. The insight is that the careerists are the effective insider salesmen of enter…

Why can’t multiple things be true at the same time?

The idea of product “officers” can be bizarre and counter productive, while that product simultaneously can be one of the best in the market.

I’m not saying that O365 is great, I use it at work and I hate it, but enterprise software has always been like this: it’s not enough to be better, you need to be something like 3x better, but if you are it doesn’t matter if you’re going up against Microsoft. Software is a lot more competitive in that way than a lot of other industries.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#199

Post by amenod »

hnarn wrote: post #170
yobbo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 busi…

Gmail is a market leader only because it is good enough (and at the start it was even better than competition) and because it was free - and still is for some cases. Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them.

Otherwise, I'm not sure I would put Google in the mix with Oracle / MS and others. They are firmly non-enterprise, in that it is notoriously difficult to get any support from them, even if you are paying (there are exceptions, yadda yadda...). With Oracle, their products may suck (and they do), but the company knows to answer the phone for their customers, otherwise they won't be able to sell that beefy contract in a few months' time.

> 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?

Oracle? Lol.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#200

Post by teh64 »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #179
lp0_on_fire wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is not the same analogy, because a chef's job is to make food, but say a trucking companies job is not to create GPS and mapping software, or some HR tool which tracks sick days etc... The difference is what the core competency of the company is.
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