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

Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 430 posts

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#351

Post by thedougd »

amenod wrote: post #182
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…

I agree with you - and you are still missing the point. The enterprises are buying a service. They don't care that it is running on AHWRGGG instead of TLMWBBB (which is soooo much better). What they care about is that it runs, and when it doesn't, that someone fixes it. This is it. Could you run everything on PostgreSQL instead of Oracle? Yes, take a look at EnterpriseDB. I guess Oracle just sells better? (guessing h…

Where you get screwed is when some legacy system of record application requires Oracle. So you think, I'll cheat and use Postgresql with an Oracle dialect. Then you find out the application uses tens of thousands of lines of PL/SQL including some of the most obscure features. Now you're looking at millions of dollars to get off the database software you don't like. Oracle, IBM, etc can buy time like this but eventually all the proponents of their software will be retired and the halls of IT will be filled with an army of "never again."

We meet on Wednesdays; the coffee and cookies are free.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#352

Post by fomine3 »

JeremyNT wrote: post #108
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.

> 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. It's not the lower level primitives here that are valuable from VMware, it's the higher level abstractions built on top of them that facilitate easie…

So looks like they could be the last player on premise, like mainframes by IBM

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#353

Post by RajT88 »

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…

I have customers running Tanzu.

It is slick, but niche. Incredibly rock solid - in ways K8S is not - and you pay for it.

It is on its way out as a product.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#354

Post by notRobot »

SSLy wrote: post #4

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

> > Announcing the deal, Broadcom said the acquisition was part of its strategy to buy “established mission-critical technology businesses”.

> Seems like their software strategy is to buy a business which doesn't have much room to grow but is extremely entrenched, and then reduce staffing and raise prices as much as possible.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#355

Post by axiolite »

scarface74 wrote: post #287
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was running an x86 VM on my 16Mhz 68030 Mac LCII in 1996 in college - SoftPC by Insignia Solutions.

> I was running an x86 VM on my 16Mhz 68030 Mac LCII in 1996 in college - SoftPC by Insignia Solutions.

That's called emulation. That's not what VMWare does.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#356

Post by nereye »

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. :)

Broadcom Inc. bought Broadcom Corp. in 2015 (and presumable got its name from it).

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#357

Post by manwe150 »

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.

I think both of those are free now for consumer usage, for at least a couple years now?

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#358

Post by rodgerd »

theptip wrote: post #281
WanderPanda wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Given how pluggable k8s is, it should not surprise you that there are companies at every integration point. Tigera for network policy. Security policy vendors using admission controllers to secure clusters. Linkerd/Istio for service mesh. Storage vendors. Etc. Each integration point provides a hook for someone to do better than the default behavior and charge for it. The ecosystem is thriving and because the k8s plat…

> Given how pluggable k8s is, it should not surprise you that there are companies at every integration point.

Of course, this is pretty much what ended up destroying OpenStack outside a few niches. HP OpenStack that only worked with 3PAR SANs was a great example - every finger in the OpenStack pie was trying to push OpenStack to have corners that they could monopolise and tie to their proprietary products.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#359

Post by kortilla »

rejectfinite wrote: post #300
kortilla wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#

Calm down. I’m talking about Google and Amazon in the hypervisor space (which is about the only interesting IP VMware has). Everything VMware makes can generally be done better in-house by tech companies. VMware’s business proposition is managing all of that cruft when it’s not an area of relevance to your business.

It’s like saying Taco Bell has incredible culinary secrets because it’s so widespread.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#360

Post by scarface74 »

axiolite wrote: post #355
scarface74 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was running an x86 VM on my 16Mhz 68030 Mac LCII in 1996 in college - SoftPC by Insignia Solutions.

> I was running an x86 VM on my 16Mhz 68030 Mac LCII in 1996 in college - SoftPC by Insignia Solutions. That's called emulation. That's not what VMWare does.

From the parent poster

> I genuinely couldn't believe what I was seeing - it seemed that revolutionary, running an OS inside an OS on a desktop

SoftPC was in fact “running an OS inside an OS on the desktop “

Post reply on HN