Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consolidation in mature markets inevitably happens.
...absent functioning antitrust legislation, yes.
Is there an antitrust case to be made here? Antitrust means a lot more than just 'big company'.
Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
51–60 of 430 posts
Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
#52Enterprise 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
Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
#53Ponders 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.
VMware used to be centered around Virtualization until 2015-16 or so. Since then it has moved / expanded to Software defined Datacenters (technically virtualization, yes), Automation, Security (Carbon Black) and lately, K8s (with Tanzu). That does not mean a good chunk of revenue might still be from virtualization - FWIW, I do not have any idea on that.
Disclaimer: I am an ex-employee of VMware.
Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
#54Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
#55Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
#56"to speed up its expansion into the enterprise software business." Why does a chipmaker want/need to expand into enterprise software? Shouldn't they be expanding to making different chips?
Pairing virtualization software tech with hardware chipsets that directly support it seems like a good plan.
I think this is the play. They can create or influence standards that favor their new position - build vertical integration where others in this space cannot.
Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
#57Can we like... stop building these ginormous conglomerates? Thanks.
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.
Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
#58Ponders 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.
Azure uses Hyper-V under the hood not kvm. Its also not built on Linux.
Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
#59I didn't know VMware was still a thing. What do they even do? Who uses any of it?
Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn’t about the hypervisor. This is about the enterprise sales. A bank isn’t going to run their data center on qemu, regardless of the performance. They are going to go with the company that can sell them support contracts with dedicated engineers to answer the phone.
Big companies are starting to learn that free open source can be supported in house, in some cases it is even cheaper, but in others the flexibility of being in control of when a much needed by only you feature is developed is a big deal. Open source also is never acquired and the price jacked up to beyond the worth but they are forced to pay the price anyway because they can't get off before their license expires.
I work for a small company and they seem to have figured this out 20 years ago. I've been tasked with supporting the network and I've got to say that all the fancy (or not) proprietary firewalls all seem like a pick your own poison of cost/support issues, and they all go end of life eventually but the network needs to keep running. We also use PFSense in a few places and I think the feeling among the operations team (2.5 of us) is that we'd like to just use that in future.