Broadcom Ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers (theregister.com) 70
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Broadcom is tossing the majority of VMware's Cloud Services Providers as part of its shakeup of the virtualization titan's partner programs, say sources, leaving customers unclear who their IT supplier will be. The $61 billion purchase of VMware by Broadcom in November was swiftly followed by news of how it planned to reorganize the business into several Broadcom divisions. A month later we revealed that Broadcom intended to discontinue VMware's channel program, and that some solution providers/ resellers would be transitioned to its own scheme, but on an invitation-only basis, from February. However, while Broadcom informed one part of VMware's channel of this change, a second notice was also sent to Cloud Services Providers (CSPs), informing them that their program is going to be terminated at the end of April. This program allows service providers such as smaller cloud operators to sell a VMware-based cloud service.
In the letter, seen by The Register, Broadcom tells its cloud provider partners: "Effective April 30, 2024, the ability to transact as a VMware Cloud Services Provider, under the VMware Partner Connect Program, will come to an end. However, we want to emphasize that you may have the opportunity to join the Broadcom Expert Advantage Partner Program. This invite-only program has simpler requirements and offers expanded benefits, and we will begin inviting partners to join in early 2024." One service provider told us their company had been left in the dark since that letter was received, and Broadcom has given them no indication of whether they will be invited to join its partner program or not, or what their customers are supposed to do if the company loses the right to operate a VMware cloud service. "I don't know how many smaller providers are affected by this but it must be a very large number," the source told us. "The VCSP program was the only way for MSPs and service providers to offer a multi-tenant VMware-based cloud service."
Chatter among some in the industry is that Broadcom is only interested in keeping the largest and most profitable customers, and the company simply doesn't care about the smaller users and the providers that service them. Unconfirmed fears that are only ten percent of Vmware's biggest CSPs will be invited to the new master program. "This all sounds very much like Broadcom taking an aggressive approach to its route to market and focusing on those partners that can deliver growth and significant revenue," said Omdia chief analyst Roy Illsley. "I suspect the intention is to ensure that VMware consists of only profitable products and they are sold in a more cohesive way with the rest of Broadcom. So I expect to see some news on this continuing to come out for most of 2024 as the company puts this plan into action. I would not rule out disposals of some assets in a drive to streamline the portfolio to those that fit with Broadcom's strategy." "How can they just cancel a major program affecting hundreds, perhaps thousands of customers, with zero notice, and zero details?" said one service provider. "They sent the notices out the Friday before the holidays, with no follow-up, which makes the situation even more egregious. What are we supposed to tell our customers? It's mind-boggling."
In the letter, seen by The Register, Broadcom tells its cloud provider partners: "Effective April 30, 2024, the ability to transact as a VMware Cloud Services Provider, under the VMware Partner Connect Program, will come to an end. However, we want to emphasize that you may have the opportunity to join the Broadcom Expert Advantage Partner Program. This invite-only program has simpler requirements and offers expanded benefits, and we will begin inviting partners to join in early 2024." One service provider told us their company had been left in the dark since that letter was received, and Broadcom has given them no indication of whether they will be invited to join its partner program or not, or what their customers are supposed to do if the company loses the right to operate a VMware cloud service. "I don't know how many smaller providers are affected by this but it must be a very large number," the source told us. "The VCSP program was the only way for MSPs and service providers to offer a multi-tenant VMware-based cloud service."
Chatter among some in the industry is that Broadcom is only interested in keeping the largest and most profitable customers, and the company simply doesn't care about the smaller users and the providers that service them. Unconfirmed fears that are only ten percent of Vmware's biggest CSPs will be invited to the new master program. "This all sounds very much like Broadcom taking an aggressive approach to its route to market and focusing on those partners that can deliver growth and significant revenue," said Omdia chief analyst Roy Illsley. "I suspect the intention is to ensure that VMware consists of only profitable products and they are sold in a more cohesive way with the rest of Broadcom. So I expect to see some news on this continuing to come out for most of 2024 as the company puts this plan into action. I would not rule out disposals of some assets in a drive to streamline the portfolio to those that fit with Broadcom's strategy." "How can they just cancel a major program affecting hundreds, perhaps thousands of customers, with zero notice, and zero details?" said one service provider. "They sent the notices out the Friday before the holidays, with no follow-up, which makes the situation even more egregious. What are we supposed to tell our customers? It's mind-boggling."
Broadcomm has been a soul sucking capitalist group (Score:5, Interesting)
What they are exposing is how "free capitalism", meaning unregulated and not controlled, can destroy an industry titan like VMWare.
There are alternatives to VMWare, so Virtualization isnt going anywhere, but VMWare always was the leader in how it is done, how managing a VM environment should be done, and how small a footprint it is to make VMWare happen.
It saddens and angers me that VMWare is essentially getting destroyed by a company that paid too much for it, and is requiring a (for now), captivated user base to pay over 500% more for a product that they havent made better, just purchased.
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Re:Broadcomm has been a soul sucking capitalist gr (Score:5, Insightful)
These are 1980s methods on 2020 timeline.
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If their goal is to destroy the value of Broadcom overall for short-term profits leading to bigger golden parachutes, retiring early to private islands, then the method succeeds.
That's exactly what their goal is. This is why Private Equities are so profitable. They destroy the companies they purchase, firing everyone, putting the product on life-support, hijacking prices, and squeezing every cent they can. They don't care if this will cause ill will, because they don't intend to keep that business long term. Once customers managed to run away, they simply shut the operation down, sell its physical assets, then sell its patent portfolio for patent trolls to use, or use them that way
Re:Broadcomm has been a soul sucking capitalist gr (Score:5, Interesting)
They haven't forgotten, they just never believed in it.
There was a leaked presentation from one of their software acquisitions a while back. Their strategy was that they figured something like 20% of the acquisition targets customer base were so hopelessly locked in that they could raise prices 5 fold or more.
The thing is, business wise, they may be right in the context of business IT. The small shops tend to be the ones you have to be most competitive to retain. Those shops are at the highest risk for already having moved to Microsoft or KVM or a cloud hosting provider. These shops are watching their spend more carefully and have more communication and awareness of what the entire company is doing to know what they can/can't get away with. These tend to be environments where all employees have more skin in the game of cost management.
Contrast with the "whales" of the industry, that are likely to tolerate a huge price hike because it's too much risk and trouble to evaluate any other way. Stakeholders in those companies tend to be so far removed from the financial piece of it that they will fight tooth and nail to avoid any change without any incentive to seek more cost effective approaches.
Further, to keep your product attractive requires R&D spend, and Broadcom tends to not like R&D spend. Each customer represents support burden that requires staffing, while taking care of a small customer base is cheaper support wise.
I would also say that the traditional "long tail" strategy fell out of favor with a lot of companies in the wake of the 2021 shortages. They found record profits with less work and spend than usual. Less warranty risk, less staffing of support lines, fewer sales relationships to tend to, but gouging the hell out of those that remain.
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There are alternatives to VMWare, so Virtualization isnt going anywhere,
This is the key, VMWare had an early lead in x86 virtualization but once they had competitors it was only a matter of time before they became irrelevant. Broadcom is only trying to extract as much money as they can before it dies completely and becomes worthless.
Why would you pay extra for VMWare when your existing Windows licenses already include Hyper-V and KVM/XEN are available for free, with a whole variety of management frameworks.
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There are alternatives to VMWare, so Virtualization isnt going anywhere,
This is the key, VMWare had an early lead in x86 virtualization but once they had competitors it was only a matter of time before they became irrelevant. Broadcom is only trying to extract as much money as they can before it dies completely and becomes worthless.
Why would you pay extra for VMWare when your existing Windows licenses already include Hyper-V and KVM/XEN are available for free, with a whole variety of management frameworks.
The same reason people use Google when it has competitors... It didn't just start with a huge lead, it maintained it.
There is a very thin line between a justifiable price tag and outright gouging. VMWare typically played very fast and loose with it. However wont take much for some companies to say, well screw that, it's not any cheaper than AWS/Azure/GCP or well screw that, Nutanix does 80% of what we use VMWare for so lets try that.
I'm hoping Broadcomm sells off VMWare before they ruin it too much. T
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Except VMWare only kept their lead in the enterprise space. Everywhere else they've lost it completely. VMWare started as the kind of vrrtualization, then lost it as others came into the space - from OS level ones like Hyper-V, Xen and KVM, to ones like VirtualBox. Heck, VirtualBox has ended up being the standard virtualization platform on desktop used by basically everyone.
I was told to set
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Be honest.
The only reason VirtualBox is so ubiquitous is because it's free.
As for Parallels "winning out".
Not sure if create a bunch of Docker containers really qualifies as "winning".
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Be honest.
The only reason VirtualBox is so ubiquitous is because it's free.
As for Parallels "winning out".
Not sure if create a bunch of Docker containers really qualifies as "winning".
This, It's a pyric victory claiming VMWare only leads in the commercial space because 99% of hypervisor usage is in the commercial space. Not even Microsoft has made inroads here and they made Hyper-V free.
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Please understand. I'm not declaring VMWare a "winner" either.
My point is that NONE of them "won".
I'd argue that everyone LOST (especially the end user).
As all the options out there are damaged/compromised choices.
Therefore I find the current state of virtualization...sad.
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Why would you pay extra for VMWare when your existing Windows licenses already include Hyper-V and KVM/XEN are available for free, with a whole variety of management frameworks.
Well, for a stable management framework that includes all the virtualized stuff and won't move out from under you. Who wants to deal with Windows servers at all, let alone the licensing for Hyper-V, and that ignores a whole lot of other virtual infrastructure that VMWare covered.
That said, they just pulled the rug out from under a bunch of folks, which was one of the only things they had going for them over the competition. They're going to force the hands of thousands and thousands to move to other platfor
Re:Broadcomm has been a soul sucking capitalist gr (Score:5, Insightful)
Because your license cost is on Enterprise servers, go look that up, and look up the cost of support via Microsoft.
Because Hyper-V has some abilities VMWare has, but VMware has ALL the abilities MS doesnt have.
You might run a low end environment, but some of us are working on complex, high end environments that requires a lot from our Virtual solution.
No matter what solution I look at, it will have headaches compared to VMWare.
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MS have never had the best products, but it's very difficult explaining to management why you want to pay extra for another product that's already included with the MS licenses you already have. It's why teams is so widely used despite being a pretty lousy product etc.
Also when it comes to large high end environments, AWS runs on Xen/KVM and Azure runs on Hyper-V and you don't get much larger than those. It's not that these technologies can't handle large deployments - clearly they can, you just aren't fami
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And yet they are still growing while their closest competitors are slowing down.
People don't buy MS because they have better products, they buy it because they're already locked in to some other product and they get pushed along.
If you're an MS shop then it's only a matter of time before any legacy VMWare deployments get ripped out and replaced with Hyper-V, or you move wholesale to Azure.
If you're not an MS shop you're probably heavily Linux based and using KVM or XEN already, or something based on them li
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Deployments won't be moved to Hyper-V. Microsoft has opted to kill it. Server 2022 is the last version that will include it. They want you to use AzureStack on-Prem and Azure proper for scaling. It makes sense but it is quite a bit more expensive.
Of course even Nutanix pricing has gone crazy too. As virtualization as matured, its commercial offerings just seem to be getting more and more expensive and not really providing anything new.
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MS have never had the best products, but it's very difficult explaining to management why you want to pay extra for another product that's already included with the MS licenses you already have.
People have this fantasy, but if they actually do have a "lousy" product then you would have no problem making a justifiable business case. Except the product isn't as lousy as people say and hence many people have problems justifying it.
Not that many people have problems justifying VMWare though. Your post makes the opposite case you think its making.
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Virtualisation as a thing is obviously not going anywhere, but VMware made it work in enterprises. That's not so easily replicated, so who's the stand-out replacement for vmware?
I suspect Broadcom is playing this game of chicken to rinse what it can out of the market. I can't imagine many vmware customers putting up with it long-term. Surely most shops must be looking at what they can move off it immediately and what's a slower burn. I reckon in 2 years Vmware will be like solarwinds - only the old duffers
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Re: Broadcomm has been a soul sucking capitalist g (Score:1)
It is not capitalism at fault. It is bad management. Capitalism will punish the bad decisions.
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Time for some education here I guess. Yes, capitalism allows companies to fail which is fine because that simply allows the market to see the weak players as to avoid them. Broadcomm will eventually kill all of VMWare products which is fine because that allows better players to pick up where Broadcomm dropped the ball. I say this as someone who is getting screwed by Broadcomm's poor decisions because I make heavy use of Workstation which is a great product. It performs better than VirtualBox in my setup, bu
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Capitalism is also customers abandoning VMWare for other products. If the "corporate oligarchs" lose money on the deal then they will not be rewarded for it.
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VMWare hurt them self's when they killed Linux dri (Score:2)
VMWare hurt them self's when they killed Linux drivers cutting out an lot of network cards and storage cards. On hardware that was not that old.
VMWare is toast (Score:1)
I have been using VMWare since 97. I am moving on. Every on else should also.
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I want to say it was summer of 98, because summer of 97 I went to the last E3 in Atlanta Georgia.
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VMware Workstation/Fusion explanation (Score:1)
For everyone worried about VMware Workstation/Fusion/ESXi, please refer to the end of the story I submitted to the Slashdots [slashdot.org] earlier. It is not my fault you are only reading this detail now.
Investment (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if 5% of all the license fees paid to VMWare were invested into Xen, KVM, Lustre, ZFS, Linux, Kubernetes, etc.
Business rule #1 - if your company is 100% reliant on any other company you don't really have a company, just a franchise, no matter how it's structured.
And, yes, four months' notice is unconscionable no matter what. That's an eighteen month problem on any reasonable timeline.
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Every company on the planet is 100% reliant on many other companies. Someone feeds their workers. Someone maintains the roads they use to get to work. Someone provides security. Someone provides insurance without which they couldn't legally operate. Etc.
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I'm sure the OP meant *exclusively* reliant on another company.
If McDonald's won't feed your workers anymore, then Burger King will step in. In contrast, you can't just switch away from a vendor when you've based your whole computing infrastructure on their proprietary APIs.
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There are many providers for virtualization software. You will incur costs in switch, just like if you attempt to change a security company, or a car leasing company, there will be costs.
This is why I was explaining in the recent Unity thread that in B2B relationship, trust is paramount. As a business you must choose your partner carefully, because there are many ways to get locked into a specific service or product and lose a lot of your business if the other business goes out of business/gets bought out/c
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because there are many ways to get locked into a specific service or product and lose a lot of your business if the other business goes out of business/gets bought out/changes terms and conditions/etc.
That's the point the original poster was making.
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Read to the end. Don't stop half way.
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I read it to the end. The OP said it's bad to rely on "100% rely any other company". You said that companies all rely on "many" other companies. I pointed out that those are two totally different situations. You've been hemming and hawing since that point.
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Allright, so you're a delivery company. You can't afford a massive up front investment into a huge fleet of vehicles, so you lease them.
Is your business fully dependent on the one leasing you vehicles? Yes. Is it a bad thing? Not if you pick a correct partner.
There are countless examples of this in the world of business. As a business, there are often many businesses on which you are 100% dependent for your normal operations. It's on the business leads to figure out if B2B relations are on a solid enough gr
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I'm sure you're very proud of your armchair MBA degree and mad deal-making skills.
However, you seem to be fundamentally ignorant of technical issues such as how getting hopelessly locked into a proprietary computing infrastructure is totally different from using a fungible commodity such as rental trucks.
You would be a good candidate to be a PHB, assuming you're not one already.
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You own an electric mill. Supplier of your generators goes bust. Your generator breakes. What do you do?
You own a modern tractor in green and yellow colors. You run a family farm. This tractor is needed to successfully harvest the fields you worked last half a year to get to the harvesting stage. When you start, it throws a warning on the dashboard and goes into limp mode, making harvesting impossible. You call your local yellow and green color dealer, and they tell you that the queue for servicing is four
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Business rule #1 - if your company is 100% reliant on any other company you don't really have a company, just a franchise, no matter how it's structured.
So no companies exist. The reality is in the corporate world companies are very much dependent on the products and support of other companies.
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Imagine if 5% of all the license fees paid to VMWare were invested into Xen, KVM, Lustre, ZFS, Linux, Kubernetes, etc.
The vast majority of the functionality of vmware is already in libvirt. The main thing missing is more software to tie the functionality together with OS level features to be able to do the remaining things. Some of it can even be done already but there's no GUI for it, which is a real drawback to be sure. And more of that work is likely to be done now that Broadcom has taken these actions.
Pull the rug (Score:5, Insightful)
"How can they just cancel a major program affecting hundreds, perhaps thousands of customers, with zero notice, and zero details?"
The answer to this is "because they can".
The more important question is why you tied your business to a single supplier who can pull the rug from under you like this in the first place?
You should always have multiple suppliers, or use technology you have some level of control over yourself.
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Naa, that would be, I don't know, "solid engineering"? We do not do solid engineering in Information Technology. That would cost money!
Pretty clear Broadcom is scum (Score:2)
And you should probably not get your software or hardware from scum...
Legal costs (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how much legal costs they produced by this step all over the planet.
Hmmm (Score:2)
Must be the drugs talking. https://www.latimes.com/local/... [latimes.com]
What to do (Score:2)
what their customers are supposed to do if the company loses the right to operate a VMware cloud service
What every sane person would do: Stay the fuck away from Broadcom and use an open virtualization solution instead. Broadcom got an undeserved reputation boost from supplying the RaPi chips, but that it is one of the most open source hostile companies in existence. It may not appear quite so dire if you're looking at the situation as a Vmware customer, because you've been through stuff, but if you did not immediately make other plans when Broadcom announced the takeover, you've been asleep at the wheel.
Open Source.... (Score:1)
How to kill a former visionary product. (Score:2)
Killing entire channels of delivery isn't how you sell a product, especially abruptly. Many customers depend on small to medium providers that can react quickly to their needs. I don't see Broadcom moving quickly on anything in terms of client responsiveness and they've made a strategic error in cutting these channels off.
phuck U very much, Broadcom (Score:2)
hahaha (Score:2)
"How can they just cancel a major program affecting hundreds, perhaps thousands of customers, with zero notice, and zero details?" said one service provider.
It's called capitalism, sucker. Money rules. You played the game, you helped it thrive, you should know the rules. If your contract didn't cover what happens when they decide to stop doing what they were doing then guess what? You signed up to be abandoned!
This is why Free Software will eventually conquer all. At least you would still have a product in this case. That's why Microsoft spent so much money trying to fight the GPL in particular. Left to its own devices, Free Software just keeps getting better.
This is Hock Tan's methodology (Score:2)
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I was working for Broadcom when Avago swooped in. Hock Tan came in to present his vision of the future, and it all centered on "harvestable IP." That was all the incentive I needed to take a severance package rather than take the job they were offering. It was a cool place back in the day. It's too bad.
The exact same thing happened when I was working at LSI Logic and Avago swallowed it up. Hock Tan came and gave a speech that was probably word-for-word the same as he gave at Broadcom. It wasn't long before LSI was a shell of its former self.
Fair warning (Score:3)
Don't act like this is a surprise or short notice. It isn't, and wasn't.
This was apparent in their initial acquisition filing in early 2022, and everyone with even a shred of memory knew it was going to happen, just like it's happened with every other Broadcom product ever.
Yes, in terms of operational pivots it's a bit of a short runway, even at 2 years notice. Ultimately, though, migrating off VMware to something else - proxmox preferably, or HyperV - is a fairly easy move unless you've got requirements like desktop virtualization or passthrough GPU requirements, but it's still possible. VMWare didn't, and doesn't, have any "game changing" functionality at this point which isn't available elsewhere, albeit with some degree of skill to migrate to.
Windows-only shops are going to be hard pressed due to the severe absence of skill, and likely have to migrate to HyperV, but everyone else should have a much easier time of things.
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We are a small windows shop with 6 physical servers and around 60vms that moved from hyperv to Proxmox. Proxmox works great and has built in backup solutions that also rock.
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I'm really happy to hear that. Makes my day, actually.
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Talk about glossing over ginormous details. If you built a million dollar cluster with hundreds to thousands of VMs, migrating to Proxmox is not about skill, it will be extremely time consuming and cause lots of downtime.
Compare that with Nutanix where you can use Nutanix Move regardless of Linux or Windows and total downtime per VM is a matter of minutes. That is all assuming you've gone ahead and purchased all new hardware to hold your new VMs.
Compare that with Azure Stack since Hyper-V is now deprecate
Proxmox is looking better and better every day (Score:2)
Proxmox is looking better and better every day.
What did I just read (Score:2)
The only relevant quote:
"I suspect the intention is to ensure that VMware consists of only profitable products and they are sold in a more cohesive way with the rest of Broadcom.
Non-profitable cruft is cut, only profitable products remain. This makes the company healthier, as it no longer generates loss on products. This is more of the culling of the weird state IT was in, where it didn't give a shit about market or demand or any metrics of healthy business. Instead like drug dealers, they cared about user