Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 151 posts

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#31

Post by sofixa »

elygre wrote: post #25
spydum wrote: post #11

I just hope Nutanix can keep their act together, they've been given a gift.

As someone looking at nutanix: what are the issues?

They still force you into a specific hardware organisation (hyperconverged, disks are on the compute nodes and storage is distributed) which doesn't make sense for everyone's workloads.

Also, at least a few years ago(hope it's not still the case), a lot of their services were a bunch of open source poorly stitched together with bash, and their poor abstraction over it was leaking heavily. Their APIs were also very poor (I mean, VMware's are objectively complete shit, but at least they cover almost everything; Nutanix had major gaps in API coverage).

Oh, and they're very expensive.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#32

Post by misnome »

generic92034 wrote: post #23
cjk2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember my father doing this one. He was an SME support company. With two clients. He cranked the price up 4x and said ”we’ve got them by the balls” . They both opened a tender process and shot him and he was bankrupt 6 months later.

> They both opened a tender process and shot him What does that mean?

I read as https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/get-be-s...

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#33

Post by hylaride »

alephnerd wrote: post #2

> he found the IT department using two hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, and ... VMware. The CTO felt two hypervisors was one too many and considered a consolidation Good move, and plenty more like this will happen. But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. And companies like Broadcom are fine with that because market segmentation is a thing. (A…

To be fair, the tone is supposed to be that way. It was designed as a UK-tabloid style IT news source, which have informal and opinionated tones (I don't know if it was originally done in jest or not).

The fact that it publishes in a low-brow, combative style in an industry that is (historically, anyways) mostly educated is part of the "joke", especially has most other tech press at the time it was created in the 1990s had conflict of interest relationships with tech companies (mostly relying on the same companies for advertising) - which is why the tagline is "biting the hand that feeds IT". It's easy to forget that most tech news sources were overwhelmingly uncritical to even bad tech. For those of us who had to actually deal with it, it was refreshing to know other people hated . For a good while in the 1990s (before it could stand on its own) it was a site written by people who actually worked with products from the tech companies (with their sales people) and could comment if they were going downhill or got screwed by pricing changes.

Is it possibly outdated and tiring now? Sure (it stopped being a daily news source for me around 2010), but it helps to understand the history and why it is or was popular.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#34

Post by re-thc »

generic92034 wrote: post #23
cjk2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember my father doing this one. He was an SME support company. With two clients. He cranked the price up 4x and said ”we’ve got them by the balls” . They both opened a tender process and shot him and he was bankrupt 6 months later.

> They both opened a tender process and shot him What does that mean?

[flagged]

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#35

Post by re-thc »

avidphantasm wrote: post #10

I admit to not understanding or caring about the full scope of Computershare’s business (side note: that’s a dumbass name), but having been forced to suffer their software when working for a former company, it boggles my mind that they need 24,000 VMWare VMs, in addition to a bunch of Nutanix VMs.

> it boggles my mind that they need 24,000 VMWare VMs

Their whole business is based on computer sharing. There's a lot of microservices to make it happen.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#36

Post by m0llusk »

rapsey wrote: post #30
cjk2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember my father doing this one. He was an SME support company. With two clients. He cranked the price up 4x and said ”we’ve got them by the balls” . They both opened a tender process and shot him and he was bankrupt 6 months later.

I'm guessing those examples are legion. Always treat your costumers and partners with respect. Another famous example is BeOS thinking they have Apple by the balls to be the basis for OSX. Demanded an outrageous price, Apple just used a BSD.

That is not a good comparison. NeXT was far more than "a BSD". It was a whole bunch of frameworks, development tools, applications, and a hardened team that had already ported to several other architectures. BeOS was still mostly vision at that point.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#37

Post by karmarepellent »

alephnerd wrote: post #2

> he found the IT department using two hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, and ... VMware. The CTO felt two hypervisors was one too many and considered a consolidation Good move, and plenty more like this will happen. But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. And companies like Broadcom are fine with that because market segmentation is a thing. (A…

> Good move, and plenty more like this will happen.

What is a good move? Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying, but I thought the main lesson from the whole VMware fiasco would be that IT departments would not rely on a single vendor/hypervisor in the future. This consolidation just increases their dependence on Nutanix, does it not?

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#38

Post by yokaze »

alephnerd wrote: post #21
pmx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

What are you gonna do?

I'd rather start early to have a migration path, even if it is just for negotiation purposes. And if it's someone who has the resources to that, it's large customers.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#39

Post by mattlondon »

generic92034 wrote: post #23
cjk2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember my father doing this one. He was an SME support company. With two clients. He cranked the price up 4x and said ”we’ve got them by the balls” . They both opened a tender process and shot him and he was bankrupt 6 months later.

> They both opened a tender process and shot him What does that mean?

I interpreted it as "fired him"

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#40

Post by op00to »

pmx wrote: post #5
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #4

> Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND research, told The Register that VMware by Broadcom is “laser focused on high-revenue, high-margin business” and has priced its wares “just below the pain threshold for customers they care about.” If you hike your prices by 10-15x, you only need 6-10% of customers to stay to maintain your revenue, reduce costs and massively increase profit margins!

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!

I used to work for an enterprise software vendor that had LOTS of customers, and losing a single customer was painful but didn’t really affect that much. I’m now at a much smaller company, and I feel like it’s noticeable in the stock price when we gain or lose a customer. Kinda scary, but exciting at the same time. No idea if it’s just my brain inventing patterns.
Post reply on HN