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Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

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Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#331

Post by unabridged »

ghc wrote: post #84
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

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…

Nontech companies are only using spreadsheets, forms, and storage. But they spend their technical manpower on implementing business logic in closed source locked-in expensive software. I don't think its much more work just to implement the business logic in excel/google sheets and serverless functions, and end up with something much much cheaper and much more portable.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#332

Post by rad_gruchalski »

scarface74 wrote: post #320
nimbius wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incl…

You don’t grok “the enterprise”. Any CTO of a large company would feel much better about having VMWare behind them and their ecosystem than your proposed solution. “No one ever got fired for buying IBM” applies equally to big enterprise SaaS providers and companies like Oracle, Microsoft, VMWare, Salesforce, etc.

I learned this lesson in an interview once. I was bullish on sap pricing and the cost of consultants. The person from top management, multi-billion chemical, said “you think we have no money”? They did, 2 years later they’ve opened a brand new building to fit a 1000 of those consultants.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#333

Post by imwillofficial »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #316
imwillofficial wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was part of Symantec when we were acquired. I didn’t agree with all Broadcoms moves, but they empowered us to really cut the fact and focus on what we were good at.

Cut the fat, I think you mean. Not sure if that was a typo, eggcorn, or pun on truth and fiction post-acquisition...

Thank you, I did indeed mean cut the fat. I need to cut the fat on my fat fingers!

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#334

Post by TMWNN »

rsync wrote: post #307
parasubvert wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You run a well-known online backup company and I don't, but my reaction was exactly the same: The only VMware products I've ever cared about are Workstation and Fusion, neither of which is on the list.

On the one hand, it's pretty cool that VMware has pivoted so successfully over the past 15 years from being solely focused on a hypervisor (or, I suppose in modern terminology, "self-hosted cloud") business that the cloud largely supplanted. On the other hand, it's sad for someone like me, who used Workstation to run VMs at home (I moved to VirtualBox), and have thought at times about spinning up ESXi.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#335

Post by ricklamers »

I think this is actually great news. After acquisition the conglomerate level scale will slow innovation. Freeing up opportunity for talented folks to start companies in the space in the areas that are being underserved by Goliath. In addition, these types of deals prove liquidity to financiers creating precedent for financing young upstarts.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#336

Post by fuy »

rsync wrote: post #307
parasubvert wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

their main business for two decades has been datacenter virtualization. Individual developers don't care about it, sure, but it's a huge software business.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#337

Post by 0x0000000 »

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…

You covered SDN but they are also the leading SD-WAN vendor through their VeloCloud acquisition 7ish years ago. Workspace 1 is also the core for their SASE products (zero trust network access, secure web gateways, browser isolation etc) when tied with VeloCloud.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#338

Post by duskwuff »

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. :)

> not underground-dungeon-scandal "Broadcom Corporation"

TIL: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/11/nicholas200811

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#339

Post by worewood »

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

Working for a client of Broadcom, I can say that no, they don't understand how opensource works. Have a problem with one of their products which they blame on an upstream bug. They don't allocate an engineer to fix said upstream bug, supplied an workaround that didn't solve the problem just reduced number of occurrences and that's it.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#340

Post by larntz »

awild wrote: post #260
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.

They also offer tanzu as on prem cluster where you can somehow use kubernetes to provision kubernetes virtualised kubernetes clusters.

It uses cluster-api to provision clusters. It's very cool and isn't a VMware thing. It's open source, and you can easily run it on regular k8s clusters.

https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/

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