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Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

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Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#291

Post by vel0city »

scarface74 wrote: post #249
vel0city wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them. > They are firmly non-enterprise So you acknowledge you don't really have knowledge of the core enterprise suite Google sells to enterprises, but at the same time you're certain they're non-enterprise? Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps) is absolutely enterprise. They definitely have enterprise support contracts, and the few times I've had issues while…

> Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps. You hit the nail on the head why enterprises stay away from Google. They are going to lose focus on it as soon as no one internally can justify maintaining it to enhance their careers and show “scope” and “impact”.

They've been selling Google Workspace for 16 years. Its one of the biggest MDM platforms out there. ~~There are over 2 billion users of this paid enterprise suite.~~ Guess I was wrong on that figure, >2 billion users with >6 million paid subscriptions.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#292

Post by bityard »

influx wrote: post #265
colechristensen wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be mildly interested in a 5 minute pitch of what VMware is offering these days, it's been 15 years since I've touched any of their products and the way they were doing things then really seems like it is becoming increasingly irrelevant so what have they been doing instead? It looks like my vague guess of "the same but also on top of cloud providers" seems to be about right given a quick glance at their websi…

I run esxi on my (admittedly beefy), home server. It is a fantastic piece of software that can be completely controlled through a web browser. I can easily spin up a couple of VMs, interact with the install without having to use a remote virtual keyboard/video switch, and the whole thing is rock solid. I could probably do a lot of the same thing with Linux itself, but the web interface is so nice, I'm keeping it as l…

You can do the same thing with Proxmox VE. IMO, Proxmox is a much better choice for stand-alone VM hosts. The UI alone is certainly miles better.

Where VMware shines is when you want to virtualize multiple datacenters and manage them all from a single browser window. Getting hundreds of hosts and datastores managed all under one vCenter umbrella all while eliminating single points of failure, while not trivial, is the bread and butter of VMware and it works very well once it's all up and running.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#293

Post by scarface74 »

vel0city wrote: post #291
scarface74 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps. You hit the nail on the head why enterprises stay away from Google. They are going to lose focus on it as soon as no one internally can justify maintaining it to enhance their careers and show “scope” and “impact”.

They've been selling Google Workspace for 16 years. Its one of the biggest MDM platforms out there. ~~There are over 2 billion users of this paid enterprise suite.~~ Guess I was wrong on that figure, >2 billion users with >6 million paid subscriptions.

Those are non paid users

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...

> As of March 2020, there were 6 million paid customers, according to Google’s most recent publicly available stats.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#294

Post by Thoreandan »

TomVDB wrote: post #216
vkat wrote: post #196

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

After being acquired by Avago, Broadcom ceased to be a single company. It’s a conglomerate of entities/BUs that are explicitly asked to NOT work cooperatively, so that each entity can be sold at moment’s notice if it doesn’t deliver the right financial results anymore. Chances are that the current leadership doesn’t care about how VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase metrics that Wall Street c…

Thanks for the clarification - it's the corporate-shoggoth of HP>Agilent>Infineon+LSI>Avago "Broadcom Inc." not underground-dungeon-scandal "Broadcom Corporation". Their NASDAQ ticker is still AVGO. :)

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#295

Post by mbreese »

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

Bingo! If you are a manufacturing company, you care about two things:

1) does this software do the job I need?

2) does this software cost less than the value I get out of using it?

If the answer is "yes and yes" then -- congratulations! you made a sale!

Sure, if some other company comes in and says "hey, I can do the same job, but cheaper," the customer would listen. But so long as the software works good enough, then the externalities of support contracts, billing, "enterprisey-stuff" may matter more than features or performance.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#296

Post by vel0city »

scarface74 wrote: post #293
vel0city wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been selling Google Workspace for 16 years. Its one of the biggest MDM platforms out there. ~~There are over 2 billion users of this paid enterprise suite.~~ Guess I was wrong on that figure, >2 billion users with >6 million paid subscriptions.

Those are non paid users https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move... > As of March 2020, there were 6 million paid customers, according to Google’s most recent publicly available stats.

Ah, I misread their announcements.

There's still supposedly over 2 billion users of these services. Its not a small project with a niche client set where absolutely nobody pays. Reader was popular, but not 2 billion users popular. How many people do you think really used Allo? Its really not in the same space as the many products they've killed.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#298

Post by m3adow »

WanderPanda wrote: post #244
hodgesrm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VMware learned their lesson from OpenStack, where emerging upstream technology threatened their virtualization monopoly. They also were forced to go in this direction by their enterprise customers, who are very dependent themselves on open source technology. One of the opportunities at VMware is monetize the open source investment more effectively, especially Kubernetes. I still don't totally understand how they plan…

Given the situation of Docker, it doesn’t look good for the monetization of Kubernetes, or am I missing something (I‘m not too familiar with Kubernetes)?

There's stuff like Openshift and Rancher as commercial Kubernetes distributions as well as a lot of Kubernetes "addons" like weave, portworx, etc. Monetisation of Kubernetes is totally possible.

Docker failed because they tried to compete with Kubernetes, lost and then didn't have a clue how to find a niche where they could enrich the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#299

Post by nimbius »

treesknees wrote: post #183
nimbius wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare Do you have any sources for this? I worked at a company developing NFV appliances, we always had much higher network throughput on VMware than we did using KVM without using some type of convoluted vswitch alternative or PCI passthrough. VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD, deleg…

colour me unimpressed. VMWare cheerleaders haul out openstack as their touchstone example of how hard VM's are in linux but forget that VMWare pales in comparison to what Openstack is, which is an entire full-stack cloud hosting provider with accounting, DNS, tenant metering and network delegation, and support for k8s.

Start comparing VMWare against Proxmox, which is an out of the box solution anyone can use and includes every single feature of ESX and many vsphere features youd easily lose your shirt for. https://www.proxmox.com/en/

heres an independent performance test. KVM is easily faster than ESX.

https://www.spec.org/virt_sc2013/

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#300

Post by rejectfinite »

kortilla wrote: post #57
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If intellectual property (specifically software patents) were weakened, this would be less of a problem, right? Companies don't buy companies, they buy IP, as I understand it.

No, not in the software industry. Nothing VMware has in pure IP is that special. I can’t think of any of the big tech companies that even use VMware. Broadcom is paying for the huge enterprise customer base, sales and support connections, mindshare, and engineering org that has proven adaptable to market demands.

Such a silicon valley HN comment holy shit.

https://www.vmware.com/company/customers/index.html#

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