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Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

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Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#301

Post by rsync »

Thoreandan wrote: post #294
TomVDB wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

… and here all I wanted was updates to fusion and decent HBAs…

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#302

Post by temac »

kube-system wrote: post #104
seanw444 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, yes, Microsoft Azure running Microsoft Windows virtualization isn't shocking. They have to dogfood, or they'll be laughed at hard.

Nobody laughs when MS uses Linux.

Would it be to compete with one of their own product in such a major way and despite the integration MS did for Linux guests running on Hyper-V, yeah people would laugh. Not about them using Linux. About them having Hyper-V. Like we laughed about Visual SourceSafe.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#303

Post by emptysongglass »

awill wrote: post #266
geodel wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have this VMware Tanzu platform which is like Red Hat Openshift. A heavily customized application packaging , deployment management solution on top of Kubernetes. It can be deployed on any cloud and on-prem DCs. So kinda multi cloud bet. They are selling it in a big way.

What does "They are selling it in a big way" mean? I've never heard of it, and neither have any of the software engineers who are next to me at the office. RedHat OpenShift also bombed. They had a great start 11 years ago, but then didn't innovate, and worse, released a 2.0 that wasn't backward compatible. They used the 2.0 release as an excuse to kick off all free plans. What a joke. There's a reason Red Hat isn't a…

OpenShift is fantastic and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to any medium sized startup and up. I run it in my closet. Most medium sized startups end up building out an OpenShift-like K8s but they use 6 months to a year plus to do it.

Upgrades within major versions are totally painless, one-click affairs.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#304

Post by temac »

sitkack wrote: post #42
nwatson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2021 Broadcom semiconductor revenue was $18.8B out of $27.5 billion. Broadcom has a large portfolio of enterprise software offerings. The web page for their software offerings is at https://software.broadcom.com/ . The interesting thing you'll notice is that they do not list any specific software they offer (e.g. Symantec for enterprise security, which by the way is separate from Norton now). Rather they sell you…

https://github.com/utmapp/UTM The cool thing about UTM is that it runs hardware virt and emulation, so you can run x86 on M1, which Vmware Fusion cannot do.

x86 on M1 through Qemu is very slow though. Not really usable to run Windows 10 in good conditions, for example (good news is that this is rarely needed, Windows on Arm running x86 and x64 programs seems quite good)

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#305

Post by hodgesrm »

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)?

The lack of monetization was mostly on Docker itself as far as I can tell. For example, they could have offered secure container supply chains years ago. Instead, companies like JFrog got there first. Public cloud container repos are another example. Amazon and others got there first with products like ECS.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#306

Post by burnte »

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

> To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

New companies, too. There's a lot to be said for paying someone to make problems go away. Not everyone wants to write their own software or change their own oil.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#307

Post by rsync »

parasubvert wrote: post #275
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…

VMware has several billion-dollar or more businesses... - the core vSphere hypervisor and management software - Vmware Cloud on AWS which is pretty big on its own, plus other cloudy things like datrium / disaster recovery as a service. - cybersecurity (carbon black and secure state), which is similar to what Symantec does, will be an interesting overlap - endpoint management (security for desktops, mobile) which was…

Fascinating … your very comprehensive list does not contain the only VMware products I have ever cared about: workstation and fusion.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#308

Post by temac »

brycewray wrote: post #16

Would guess they’re high-fiving at Parallels right now.

VMWare Fusion on M1 was already way behind (to an absurd point: it has been > 1 year 1/2 after the M1 launch, and VMWare has not yet launched a release of Fusion for it, only betas, and they do not target Windows). Overwhelming most of VMWare business is about other products anyway.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#309

Post by anthk »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #175
technion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>VMware's problem nowadays is that, having basically invented the technology,

IBM, actually, on mainframes.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#310

Post by dehrmann »

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.

I also don't see any obvious synergies with a company that specializes in network chips.
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