Broadcom CEO Hock Tan this week publicized some concessions aimed at helping customers and partners ease into VMware’s recent business model changes. Tan reiterated that the controversial changes, like the end of perpetual licensing, aren’t going away. But amid questioning from antitrust officials in the European Union (EU), Tan announced that the company has already given support extensions for some VMware perpetual license holders.
↫ Scharon Harding at Ars Technica
I’m linking to the Ars Technica writeup here, because the original blog post from Broadcom’s CEO is effectively unreadable to me, as steeped in corpospeak as it is. The basic gist is that the storm of criticism that’s been hovering around Broadcom ever since the changes it announced to VMware’s licensing strategy isn’t going away, and even attracted the attention of the European Union. As such, Broadcom is giving existing perpetual VMware license holders some breathing room, but not much, and their plans will be executed as-is regardless.
I doubt Broadcom and VMware are big and crucial enough for the full might of the EU to come down on them, so I don’t think we’ll see any sudden turnarounds like we did with Apple and Facebook, for instance, but at least some cracks are clearly starting to show. If the aforementioned storm keeps up, pressure from customers might actually force more concessions out of Broadcom.
Managing to make Oracle look like the better alternative… That’s an achievement.
Yes,
Oracle will push “new clients” to their archaic architecture. But they would not (usually) be cancelling contracts one week into a merger. At least not on this scale.
Thom Holwerda,
Broadcom won’t care at all. The only thing that would prompt real change is if customers actually start leaving. Customers can moan and complain about their situation, but if they stick around then companies can still afford to treat the gestures as merely symbolic.
They are.
Broadcom’s made it pretty clear they only actually want the top end of town though, so they’re more or less ok with bleeding smaller customers.
From what I’ve heard from colleagues in the top end though, there’s a near universal search for replacements, while putting up with the terms in the meantime. Trust is gone.
The1stImmortal,
Yes, I heard Broadcom would be dropping all of vmware’s lower tier customers.
That’s just it though, if they don’t leave, then broadcom’s strategy will be considered a success by their executives despite customer displeasure.
I’m not in charge of any purchasing decisions, but if I were I’d obviously be looking at FOSS replacements.
Alfman,
In terms of vmware, I am not sure open source could be viable.
https://www.vmware.com/products/vmc-on-aws/govcloud.html
They have certifications for certain government and big customer uses.
sukru,
Not that I endorse these, but I think there’s a lot of FOSS-ready cloud providers out there including MS and amazon. Both of them have built out FOSS services for customers. They’d probably be willing and able to take on these government contracts away from vmware fairly easily. I know it’s a bit ironic for microsoft, but years ago they decided not to turn away FOSS users in the data centers and I think that was a wise business decision since windows mostly lost that market.
Alfman,
Of course Microsoft would want to take on those contracts. They already have FedRAMP certification for example:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/tag/fedramp-high/
But smaller government contractor shops that has to host their own data in house, for one reason or another, will have difficulty replacing vmware. I am not sure Xen or KVM are FedRAMP compliant (and that is the most basic requirement, there would usually be more).
sukru,
If I’m not mistaken, FedRAMP applies to the cloud providers only, not those self hosting. VMware’s description suggests it applied to the cloud providers too.
https://marketplace.cloud.vmware.com/services/details/vmware-fedramp-compliance-and-cyber-risk-solutions/
If FedRAMP is needed, I see many providers that offer it
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-openshift-service-aws-govcloud-prioritized-fedrampr-high-jab-authorization-0
https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/fedramp/
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/fedramp/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/regulatory/offering-fedramp
While I don’t think vmware is irreplaceable for those looking to switch to something else, I do agree that migrations are challenging and costly. The more you’ve customized your workflow around a vendor’s toolset/ecosystem, the more work it will be to migrate elsewhere – it’s like switching from a phone or operating system you have a lot of time invested in….possible, but not easy.
Broadcom destroyed Symantec in a similar manner. It’s what they do.
In my opinion, the EU should come down on them. They are the largest provider of virtualization products and until recently the goto if you were on prem. We might see a big surge in proxmox and other solutions soon. I was using esxi and switched to freebsd bhyve for my OS project needs.
It’s also a concern they control the spring framework. Many companies still using java are on spring. I’m sure they’ll start trying to extract profit from that as well.
Oh shit. I didn’t realize VMWare owned Spring, which means now Broadcom does *shudder*
This should also not be cleared by FTC.
Unfortunately our regulatory bodies were fishing for the “big one”. While fruitlessly trying to prevent the ABK/MS merger (which was futile when you asked any knowledgable M&A attorney), they have lost sight of their main mission. (A “Moby Dick” event).
Unfortunately we cannot force them to take action directly as the public.