Broadcom's VMware strategy looks ever more shaky – and less relevant | Hacker News Reader

Broadcom's VMware strategy looks ever more shaky – and less relevant

theregister.com

40 pointsrntn27 comments

This is a clear case where being a publicly traded company leads to perverse outcome. Why this obsession with growth? Growth should be a side effect, not your primary goal. The primary goals should be: are you solving more problems than you cause? Are your customers and employees happy? Are you fiscally solvent? Everything else is a distraction. I feel like this is why Dell went private, to avoid the imperative for mindless growth.

Veeam just got support for Proxmox virtualization platform. It just shows that the industry is slowly turning away from Vmware.

I called out that Veeam would be the winner in this but got flamed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40031058#40031622

Hmmm, it looks like you're misunderstanding what "support" means there, and your conversation in the other issue is making some wrong conclusions from that.

The support by Veeam just means their software product will officially work with Proxmox. It doesn't mean Veeam have become an option for people to contact and have general Proxmox issues fixed.

You didn't get flamed, you got downvoted, apparently because you don't understand what it means for a company such as Veeam to "support" a technology such as Proxmox. It does not mean that they offer technical support for Proxmox, but rather that their product will provide some form of backup and recovery for Proxmox VMs. (I should point out that it's currently vaporware. "General availability for Proxmox VE support is expected in Q3 2024" [0])

Even if they were to offer technical support for Proxmox (they won't) that wouldn't guarantee that they would be "the winner", and there's no guarantee of that in the backup space either. Veeam is primarily a VMware backup product with no support for the majority of workloads that large enterprises also run, so is popular in SMEs. It also has poor deduplication, making storage costs for backups considerably higher than with alternatives. If VMware's intention is to target their largest customers and eject the long tail, that leaves Veeam with a limited market. Veeam has seen that the writing's on the wall; it remains to be seen if Proxmox support will be enough to save them, as there are plenty of other alternatives to VMware.

[0] https://www.veeam.com/news/veeam-extends-data-freedom-for-cu...

Yeah. There are an awful lot of ex-VMware customers and users joining the Proxmox forums over the last two months, which is when I joined.

It'll definitely be interesting to keep an eye on.

We did our satellite office upgrades with proxmox as broadcom was hinted at during the upgradr phase and in the last two weeks we moced our head office over as well. I cant say enough good things about proxmox. Its drastically easier to deal with than vmware as well.

I don't know if anyone else noticed but the article cites an Asianometry video on the topic, but names them as Asianomics, maybe autocorrect issue?

probably. one of the most informative channels out there.

https://youtube.com/@asianometry

Had been using VMWare since it was released until ~5 years ago. Hardly looked back. Now I don't really see a reason why want to use it at all.

I'm enjoying this one. Mostly because it has motivated people to move to AWS quicker which is where I make money :)

We'll be shutting down our local rack, powered by VMWare vSphere, and move our data and internal services to the cloud.

Though to be fair it's also due to increasing security demands from customers, the VMWare thing just rushed the plan.

Is the cloud really considered more secure?

Yes, because they are certified, and that's what matters.

That said, our offices are quite hard to secure from an infosec POV, so we'd have to move most stuff out somewhere else anyway.

It's a solid strategy: Ask for 5x money from the 25% of customers who can't make the jump. End up making more money you made in the past, lose 75% of the support burden

The only downside is that you'll never get any new customers, and your product will wither and die.

That's a problem for the next quarter!

For the next CEO

VMware & on-prem is dying anyways, there’s not much opportunity to turn that one around.

That's making the wrong assumption that those 25% of customers will just sit idly by. Their migration away won't be easy, but you can bet that all of them have been at least thinking if not acting on contingencies since the acquisition was first announced. They might do the initial renewals, but within a year or two most of them will start moving away and making their VMware estates smaller, for reduced costs and also vastly improved quality for everyone involved. Once the cat is out of the bag (Broadcom forcing them to rethink their strategy), very few will remain - there are so many better options than VMware out there.

> It's a solid strategy

Except for the situations when it loses you a customer:

* https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/22/computershare_vm_migr...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40452260

I think you missed the part of the strategy where losing 75% of customers is actually part of the plan.

> I think you missed the part of the strategy where losing 75% of customers is actually part of the plan.

Yes, but they want that 75% to be a particular type of customer, i.e., all the small ones. I'm not sure if a 14,000 employee, 24,000-VM customer would be considered "small":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computershare

It's called "the Oracle way".

Isn't this entire article attempting to explain why that strategy isn't working in this instance?

This assumes the 25% won't also end up going - just a bit later.

the fact that everyone is saying "stay away from VMware products" is just a bonus, I suppose :)

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