Telefónica DE shifts VMware support to Spinnaker due to cost | Hacker News Reader

Telefónica DE shifts VMware support to Spinnaker due to cost

theregister.com

55 pointsrbanffy46 comments

Broadcom fucked up the VMWare products but good. No more products for individuals, and the enterprise cloud is losing customers.

Increasing price five-fold and losing three out of four customers still means you come out ahead revenue-wise, and your internal costs probably go down as you have so many fewer customers to support

Sounds like an interesting exit strategy.

it's not a sustainable approach, because every single one of the customers you've "retained" will be looking to dump you as soon as possible

Some percentage of customers can’t leave if they want to. The ones who have laid off and cost cut to such a level they can no longer undertake projects to move to another virtualization environment. I’m at one such company. The staff we have now couldn’t do it in a year, or even two.

> The staff we have now couldn’t do it in a year, or even two.

You're talking like two years is long term...

> it's not a sustainable approach

For the current Broadcom leadership this doesn't have to be sustainable, just bring in enough of a profit to justify the whole thing. They do not want a slow and steady profit stream but a big squeeze and done. I bet they got what they hoped for.

It’s like oil drilling, completely unsustainable but great money to be made short-term. It just needs to be milkable long enough to make more money than the acquisition price

what happens to a software product when it has a small fraction of the original users? all that free testing as customer support shifts to someone else's platform, eventually

but i think the 'eventually' is the reason this is working for them

Two of my family members built a good hunk of their careers on VMware products. This is the poster child story for why to not put all of your eggs in a single closed source basket.

Yep. One of my colleagues went all in on Crowdstrike a couple of years back. That went hilariously badly for him due to obvious reasons.

Not hilarious to him I bet..

Well we warned him. He got paid to set it up and then paid to get rid of it so it went rather well for him but not in the way he though it was going to. Plenty of time to roll out a plan B which worked out better for him anyway.

Same here, but I jumped ship to cloud, Kubernetes & Co. some years ago. I know many who still live well on VMware products, even if they are just busy migrating workloads to other platforms.

It was easy to miss between all the back and forth, but VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion are now free for all users, including for commercial use [1], and since last month, ESXi is also free, again [2].

[1] https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-...

[2] https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/399823/vmwar...

I have seen [1] a long time ago. But AFAIK until this day, the Workstation installer still asks whether you are either a private user or have a license key... So is it really free?

VMware's VM products are on way out as enterprises are all Kubernetes with containers or serverles functions and this will natural trickle down.

I suspect the strategy is to extract maximum cash whilst they can.

I deal, with mid size (200-800) people and there is no k8s or serverless to be seen anywhere.

Personally I don't have a huge amount of experience with either, so I'm possibly a bit biased, but I see k8s as either a hyperscale solution or someone wanting to be cool and trendy.

Same goes for serverless, other than niche use cases of say running python code in a 100% Azure ecosystem when you just have absolutely zero other choice.

That's why I used the term trickle down, meaning in time.

It may not be k8s as we know it today, but many SMEs are most certainly using containers, via Docker.

Ultimately containers use less resources than a full VM and allow dependency management.

VMs is a reducing business.

I generally see docker (used) as a second tier isolation. IT hands out VMs to vendors/teams, and then the vendor/team spins up 3-4 containers in that VM to suit their needs.

I'm aware it's technically possible to have a large, wide fleet of containers...but I don't really see it going that way (at all).

My current thoughts of why is separation of knowledge - IT knows how to manage infra and virtualisation, and the vendor/teams know how their individual docker containers need to be set up/work.

I do agree full virtualisation is probably on the decline, but the current tech is definitely staying around in my size of business.

It is always funny to read something like this: "[..] the telco, one of Germany's largest [..]"

There are effectively only three mobile providers in Germany. 1&1 is the fourth, but its network doesn't even cover the whole country. From those three networks, Telefonica is the smallest by quite a margin. So the sentence in the article is technically correct, but draws a nonsensical picture.

Telefonica is the one with the worst coverage of the big threes. But they allow every Discount provider to use their network, so cost-sensitive people will mostly be on their network. Telekom and Vodafone have some discounters on their network, but it's not much more than a handful.

In general, phone coverage in Germany is subpar, no matter what provider you choose. The country has too many anti-5G people with too much power to stop or delay projects.

What does 5G have to do with coverage? LTE 800mhz can give you the same coverage as 5G 700mhz

It's not about coverage, it's about conspiracy theories.

> What does 5G have to do with coverage? LTE 800mhz can give you the same coverage as 5G 700mhz

Could. But not in Germany.

Germany's comparatively bad 5G coverage is an infrastructure problem and has ~nothing to do with anti-5G sentiments.

Just look at the parallels in wired broadband, which are equally lacking behind some European peers.

> Telefonica is the smallest by quite a margin

That is only true if you count M2M sim cards. Looking at regular postpaid contracts, the picture is actually quite different:

Deutsche Telekom: 26.8m customers

Telefonica: 26.2m customers

Vodafone: 19.3m customers

They would be if they did not spend all that money on Broadcom licenses....

Ignoring MVNOs, are there are any other countries that have more than 4 nationwide mobile networks? I think the US has (had?) a handful of regional carriers that survived on domestic roaming but everywhere else I've visited typically has 3 networks competing, maybe a 4th smaller network, often a newer startup (e.g. Free in France, Rakuten in Japan, in the 2000's it was Three/Hutchinson taking this role using newly-opened UMTS licenses).

US used to have Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Cingular and ATT. There was an active roaming agreement in at least California for T-Mobile and ATT so they shared coverage there, but otherwise pretty much 5 national networks before the ATT T-1000 reformed, and Sprint died.

I've seen some countries where they had three established GSM networks and then someone starts repurposinf their CDMA network for mobile handsets, but it had been built and operating for years for fixed wireless, phone lines for houses without wires.

The Netherlands actually explicitly set aside spectrum in the 4G auctions to be auctioned off to new market entrants (besides the established T-Mobile, Vodafone, and KPN), leading to the entry of Tele2 (until then an MVNO) and Ziggo/UPC (until then cable ISPs and MVNOs) into the market.

However, a few years down the line, Tele2 ended up in a merger with T-Mobile (now Odido), and Ziggo/UPC/Vodafone went through mergers to end up as VodafoneZiggo.

Broadcom learned fast from the Computer Associates book of antics "How to bully and squeeze every dollar out of your enterprise clients on renewals"

I don't understand this article.

Assuming the "spinnaker" it talks about is https://spinnaker.io/ how does it translate the move from virtualization to deployment?

Is it being implied that Telefònica Germany is moving to the cloud, and dismissing its vmware license (and hardware, and datacenter stuff) ? Was Telefonica running vSphere on the Managed VMWare offering on AWS?

Don't get me wrong, I loathe BroadCom as much as the next guy, but this article isn't very informative.

It supports Kubernetes, so they might slowly migrate their VMs to Kubernetes pods step by step, and maybe move some of their services to the cloud (and maybe running that Oracle workloads on cloud, already).

This makes sense for the "bidders" part of the article. They need to slowly transform things and slowly desert/transform systems.

I think this is more likely to be talking about https://www.spinnakersupport.com/

And I don't think this involves moving anything other than support responsibilities.

And not this SpiNNaker either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiNNaker

They will continue using the perpetual VMware licenses.

This article is just about buying support from another provider.

> Assuming the "spinnaker" it talks about is https://spinnaker.io/ how does it translate the move from virtualization to deployment?

VMware does _a lot_ more than just virtualization these days. This most likely has something to do with Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry or just Tanzu, which does provide CI/CD services.

Which they likely migrated to Spinnaker and vanilla Kubernetes.

Did Broadcom make a conscious decision to burn the brand to the ground for a once off payoff?

They saw Oracle become gentle and soft with age, and they decided to aim for the post of most hated company in the world. My money is still on Oracle keeping the title, as they have lots of practice, but its nice to have a challenger.

Microsoft is the company who should hold the title as far as the tech giants are concerned.

What makes them worse than the above?

> What makes them worse than the above?

Oracle is mostly used on servers. /s

Note that Broadcom is trading as AVGO because Broadcom went the same faith as VMware, bought by Avago and turned to shit for short term gains

Spinnaker claims to do security support - how do they do that if they don't have licenses from Broadcom?

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