70% of Large VMware Customers Bought Broadcom's Biggest Bundle (theregister.com) 30
Broadcom's VMware acquisition has significantly boosted revenue, largely driven by high-priced VMware Cloud Foundation bundles adopted by the majority of its top customers. The Register reports: Broadcom's acquisition of VMware appears to be a big success, on the balance sheet at least, after the company announced a big majority of its top 10,000 customers have decided to acquire its Cloud Foundation stack and posted strong growth. The chips-and-code company today announced its results for the quarter ended February 2nd, its first for FY 2025. Revenue of $14.92 billion represented 25 percent year-on-year growth. Net income of $5.5 billion was a 315 percent increase on the result from Q1 2024.
Broadcom no longer breaks out VMware revenue: sales of Virtzilla's wares are all now lumped into its infrastructure software business unit, which posted $6.7 billion revenue for Q1, up from $4.55 billion for the same quarter last year. Direct comparisons of those numbers are not wise as Broadcom owned VMware for four fifths of Q1 2024. Consider, instead, the $1.97 billion Q4 2023 and $7.6 billion FY 2023 software revenue that Broadcom recorded before it acquired VMware.
Know, also, that Broadcom's software sales grew by just three percent in FY 2023 and four percent in FY 2022. That slow growth means the jump from $1.97 billion software revenue in Q4 2023 to $6.7 billion in Q1 2025 is likely due to VMware, which in its last quarter as an independent company reported $3.4 billion revenue. It therefore looks a lot like Broadcom has added around $1 billion to quarterly VMware revenue in a little over a year.
Broadcom no longer breaks out VMware revenue: sales of Virtzilla's wares are all now lumped into its infrastructure software business unit, which posted $6.7 billion revenue for Q1, up from $4.55 billion for the same quarter last year. Direct comparisons of those numbers are not wise as Broadcom owned VMware for four fifths of Q1 2024. Consider, instead, the $1.97 billion Q4 2023 and $7.6 billion FY 2023 software revenue that Broadcom recorded before it acquired VMware.
Know, also, that Broadcom's software sales grew by just three percent in FY 2023 and four percent in FY 2022. That slow growth means the jump from $1.97 billion software revenue in Q4 2023 to $6.7 billion in Q1 2025 is likely due to VMware, which in its last quarter as an independent company reported $3.4 billion revenue. It therefore looks a lot like Broadcom has added around $1 billion to quarterly VMware revenue in a little over a year.
yeah no. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nutanix has been putting in some work, and it may pay off big time for them.
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I wonder how proxmox benefited from the ones moving. Would big outfits be willing to move to proxmox with commercial support using other tools in that eco-system as well? What percentage of the ones moving did proxmox manage to pick up? etc.
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Nutanix needs to support NFS datastores. I'm kinda surprised to learn that they still don't.
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I probably have less exposure to VMWare customers than you (my main job doesn't have a whole lot of intersection with them), but I was sort of attached to a migration effort for one customer.
The customer pretty quickly had a proof of concept of their tech stack without vmware. The tech people ultimately can't find any specific showstoppers. Their management has issued delays to do even a partial deployment into production every time their begin date came within a couple of months. Asking their tech team, th
Re:yeah no. (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I really don't want the Broadcom strategy to work, I think it's broadly working. They really seemed to correctly peg VMWare customers as fearful suckers spending the company dollar they don't care about anyway.
I don't think it's actually working.
Yes, the numbers look good *right now*, at the one-year mark, because of purely artificial reasons. Most companies who had annual support contracts probably needed to renew them while they worked on moving away, so of course they bought the biggest bundle to ensure there weren't any licensing woes for the interim.
I'm pretty sure that nearly all of them have already invested into some sort of not-VMWare solution, be it Nutanix or Hyper-V or Proxmox, and have moved at least some of the workload to those. As the hosts can be freed up and converted, and as SANs are restructured or replaced, and as things that were candidates for AWS/Azure migration are migrated, there will be fewer and fewer VMs on VMWare hosts.
Proxmox's live migration tool is still in alpha mode, and Veeam's support for Proxmox is functional, but unpolished. Nakivo and a few other backup solutions also support Proxmox / Nutanix / Xen, or are in the process of implementing it.
The question wasn't whether renewals would look good *this* year, it's what they look like *next* year. The problem with 300% YoY growth is that the suits are going to want growth on top of that next year. If they squeeze that hard, again, the fearful suckers will learn that they'll either have to move, or hand *their* bonus checks over to VMWare.
Will VMWare be able to survive on 1,000 customers writing seven figure checks or more? Probably, but catering exclusively to whales means that losing even one of them means missing revenue forecasts. It also means that they're unlikely to find any new clients, making it harder to replace those whales.
Now, to another commenter's point, it's entirely possible that this acceptable to a good number of folks - as long as the acquisition breaks even and they show enough YoY growth to cash their check and leave someone else holding the bag, they achieved their goal, and a second year of $15B gross revenue is likely enough to ensure the checks clear. Anyone relying on those numbers in year three, however, is likely to find themselves in a similar spot as anyone currently holding on to NFTs.
Re:yeah no. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why wait for Veeam when Proxmox comes with Proxmox Backup Server?
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Why wait for Veeam when Proxmox comes with Proxmox Backup Server?
Because Proxmox Backup Server has a number of limitations.
Can I add an SMB or NFS location for backup? Only if I mount it in /etc/fstab and tell PBS to pretend it's a folder; it doesn't allow LAN storage natively as a repo.
Can I back up to a cloud repository? Only with some very hackneyed, unsupported workaround.
Can I back up to rotated USB drives? Not if there's an incremental chain involved.
So, Proxmox Backup Server is pretty good if the destination is the internal storage of the backup server or a tape d
vmware is basically EOL (Score:1)
There is no plan to sustain VMWare as a business indefinitely (ala IBM z series). The company reached the point where it was no longer economically viable to continue. This happens to a lot of legacy companies when revenue starts to decline, while costs continue to go up (people need raises, rent goes up, etc.).
The normal option is, it would need to slowly bleed to death and die from a hundred rounds of layoffs. The alternative is, Broadcom laid off all the people who would keep the company going and fired
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The in
VMWare might be the new COBOL (Score:2)
It is less scary to overpay for a known slow dying product than switching to a next gen stack.
In some cases these companies go through a slow death and get replaced by newcomers, and that legacy stack can finally be put to rest.
Airlines still buy floppy disks: https://interestingengineering... [interestin...eering.com]
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Re: yeah no. (Score:2)
It works short term, just gut the profits and when the influx slows down the owners cuts down the workforce to a minimum to show good figures. This will bump the share prices. Then they sell. Take rhe money and run. Rinse and repeat.
Tends to happen (Score:2)
When there is no real-world alternative. Sure, you can migrate to other products - but that is not as easy as just paying up.
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I keep seeing this message but what i see is people locking themselves into rigid solutions. Why isn't it easy to migrate? That is the question you should be asking.
Re: Tends to happen (Score:2)
> Why isn't it easy to migrate? That is the question you should be asking.
For many organizations, it takes one person to keep VMWare running - and it can take a team to migrate to something new.
We dumped VMWare like a hot potato. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's gone. We're 100% off of it. This is the answer.
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what's your replacement for it?
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I second the question. I have been firmly FreeBSD since 2.1, but I have worked with Linux during the years, and I would like to move to a hypervisor instead of a fixed OS. I did play with Xen some years ago, but I would appreciate some advice from those who have tried everything.
FWIW, I strongly like ZFS, so that would be a factor. But I am okay with just playing around with a spare PC with any FS and OS to get the feel for things.
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If neither my question nor yours gets a reply from someone who's dumped VMware, try asking around on Reddit.
A lot of people seem to like Proxmox. I tried it a couple times and thought it was pretty good but I kept going back to either VMware ESXi or Workstation Pro
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One of my hosting providers, IONOS, must have read the tea leaves. They got off VMware a couple of years ago and moved to Virtuozzo.
Everyone I know is dumping VMWare (Score:2)
They really screwed the pooch on this one. They took the best, most well known and loved product almost ever and tried to turn it into a money making machine right when alternatives were catching up and surpassing it. VMWare FTW! Also it was retarded that DellEMC spun it off in the first place. So much synergy lost.
300% price increase? No, thanks. (Score:2)
300% price increase? Who accepts that?!
No, thanks.