Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
reuters.comFor anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares.
Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects.
Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware
After being acquired by Avago, Broadcom ceased to be a single company. It’s a conglomerate of entities/BUs that are explicitly asked to NOT work cooperatively, so that each entity can be sold at moment’s notice if it doesn’t deliver the right financial results anymore.
Chances are that the current leadership doesn’t care about how VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase metrics that Wall Street considers important.
Expect major cuts in R&D, receptionists, travel expenses, general benefits, and virtually no hiring of college grads or interns. You’ll be on the phone in a queue for hours to get outsourced IT support.
Support of open source should be the least of your worries.
Stock price might go up though…
This is exactly correct. Hock (love him or hate him) knows exactly what he is doing, and is entirely unapologetic. He looks only at margin. You have $10B revenue stream at 2% profit margin? Hock will happily cut that in half for a 10% margin he can depend on. It's all about ARR. Great for shareholders and those with a mountain of RSU's... but not so great for employees. Was at CA...saw it happen.
> It's all about ARR.
You argued the exact opposite? You're saying it's all about EBITDA...
I don't think so. Certainly, EBITDA is part of any story. What I was trying to convey was that Broadcom very much wants their customers to be engaged in a strong subscription model... big, recurring license agreements. Customers who, year after year, can be relied upon to send Broadcom money...even if they buy nothing new. Broadcom likes those Big Companies who can be counted upon to spend a consistent (but never shrinking) amount every year. Hock is ruthless in this...and has a pretty good bullshit detector... again, he probably makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Nothing wrong with that approach... it's very pragmatic... especially for shareholders. Broadcom might give you more for your money every year, but you will never spend less of it.
Thanks for the clarification - it's the corporate-shoggoth of HP>Agilent>Infineon+LSI>Avago "Broadcom Inc." not underground-dungeon-scandal "Broadcom Corporation". Their NASDAQ ticker is still AVGO. :)
> not underground-dungeon-scandal "Broadcom Corporation"
… and here all I wanted was updates to fusion and decent HBAs…
Broadcom Inc. bought Broadcom Corp. in 2015 (and presumable got its name from it).
I was part of Symantec when we were acquired. I didn’t agree with all Broadcoms moves, but they empowered us to really cut the fact and focus on what we were good at.
Cut the fat, I think you mean.
Not sure if that was a typo, eggcorn, or pun on truth and fiction post-acquisition...
Thank you, I did indeed mean cut the fat. I need to cut the fat on my fat fingers!
I was very surprised when the product quality went up, for the Symantec software I use.
To be fair, prior to broadcom purchase symantec was not known fo high product quality
In the sysadmin world, Backup Exec and Norton products are meme's at this point, examples of the worst kind of software
so I am not sure how it could have gone down in quality
The consumer grade Symantec software and enterprise Symantec software were always different.
Norton never had any real bearing on SEP.
The consumer side of Symantec was not sold to Broadcom and became Norton Lifelock.
It's amazing our system rewards all of those things. Cutting r&d, cutting jobs, cutting downstream contractors, using profit for stock buybacks, etc
Optimizing for efficiency isn't a bad thing. The real problem is the larger economic feedback loop based around keeping the number of hours worked the same. So the efficiency gains are effectively lost, and the average worker is left still depending on the ever-optimized structure rather than being able to accumulate enough wealth to escape it and create new structures.
Consistent with my experience as a customer of other Broadcom purchases.
VMware learned their lesson from OpenStack, where emerging upstream technology threatened their virtualization monopoly. They also were forced to go in this direction by their enterprise customers, who are very dependent themselves on open source technology.
One of the opportunities at VMware is monetize the open source investment more effectively, especially Kubernetes. I still don't totally understand how they plan to do that but wish them (you) all well.
Disclaimer: Former employee of VMware
Given the situation of Docker, it doesn’t look good for the monetization of Kubernetes, or am I missing something (I‘m not too familiar with Kubernetes)?
Given how pluggable k8s is, it should not surprise you that there are companies at every integration point. Tigera for network policy. Security policy vendors using admission controllers to secure clusters. Linkerd/Istio for service mesh. Storage vendors. Etc. Each integration point provides a hook for someone to do better than the default behavior and charge for it.
The ecosystem is thriving and because the k8s platform was built to be pluggable; it is an actual platform. Docker (the company) tried to monopolize and monetize when they built Swarm, and that’s why they lost the cluster orchestrator space IMO. Docker (the tool) is just a tool, not really something you can monetize easily. Docker (the image format) is where most of the value lives, there isn’t much value to extract there as it’s an open protocol.
Docker (the tool) was commoditized by k8s, and now there isn’t really any way to charge for a differentiated implementation. Providing a registry and a best-in-class Docker for Desktop experience isn’t going to be a huge TAM.
> Given how pluggable k8s is, it should not surprise you that there are companies at every integration point.
Of course, this is pretty much what ended up destroying OpenStack outside a few niches. HP OpenStack that only worked with 3PAR SANs was a great example - every finger in the OpenStack pie was trying to push OpenStack to have corners that they could monopolise and tie to their proprietary products.
So you mean to say it's layer violation soup.
I want to "Integrationware" software that just exists for various vendors to cut deals and piggy-back with oneanother.
The lack of monetization was mostly on Docker itself as far as I can tell. For example, they could have offered secure container supply chains years ago. Instead, companies like JFrog got there first. Public cloud container repos are another example. Amazon and others got there first with products like ECS.
The cloud vendors, that cooperatively are building Kubernetes, are making bank off of Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is fine.
Multi billion dollar businesses. Just look at AWS EKS.
Docker didn't really attempt to monetize Kubernetes at all until the writing was on the wall, instead they had their own thing (Swarm) that they were pushing but most of the ecosystem went in the other direction.
There's stuff like Openshift and Rancher as commercial Kubernetes distributions as well as a lot of Kubernetes "addons" like weave, portworx, etc. Monetisation of Kubernetes is totally possible.
Docker failed because they tried to compete with Kubernetes, lost and then didn't have a clue how to find a niche where they could enrich the Kubernetes ecosystem.
If you're looking for an example of successful monetization of open source addons for K8s, you could do much better than the example of Weave Net.
I would be mildly interested in a 5 minute pitch of what VMware is offering these days, it's been 15 years since I've touched any of their products and the way they were doing things then really seems like it is becoming increasingly irrelevant so what have they been doing instead? It looks like my vague guess of "the same but also on top of cloud providers" seems to be about right given a quick glance at their website, but I'm curious to know a bit more.
VMware has several billion-dollar or more businesses...
- the core vSphere hypervisor and management software
- Vmware Cloud on AWS which is pretty big on its own, plus other cloudy things like datrium / disaster recovery as a service.
- cybersecurity (carbon black and secure state), which is similar to what Symantec does, will be an interesting overlap
- endpoint management (security for desktops, mobile) which was AirWatch
- management (monitoring & automation) aka. vRealize and Cloud Health
- workspace / single sign on, similar to okta (Workspace ONE)
- virtual desktops (Horizon) which compete with Citrix
- software defined networking (NSX) which competes with F5, Cisco, Juniper etc.
- modern apps (Tanzu) which is largely open source... containers & developer tools & data services & agile consulting, e.g. Spring, Apache Tomcat, RabbitMQ, Greenplum, Wavefront, Bitnami / Kubeapps, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Labs (now Tanzu Labs)
Fascinating … your very comprehensive list does not contain the only VMware products I have ever cared about: workstation and fusion.
You run a well-known online backup company and I don't, but my reaction was exactly the same: The only VMware products I've ever cared about are Workstation and Fusion, neither of which is on the list.
On the one hand, it's pretty cool that VMware has pivoted so successfully over the past 15 years from being solely focused on a hypervisor (or, I suppose in modern terminology, "self-hosted cloud") business that the cloud largely supplanted. On the other hand, it's sad for someone like me, who used Workstation to run VMs at home (I moved to VirtualBox), and have thought at times about spinning up ESXi.
> a well-known online backup company and I don't
What’s up with this? Did their company steal the name of the tool rsync?
In early 2006 I asked the original author and the current maintainer for their blessing to use the domain "rsync.net" for (re)incorporating the offsite backup component of the ISP I started in 2001[1].
I gave them right of first refusal, etc., and they said my use of "rsync.net" as the name of the company, domain name, etc., was acceptable.
[1] "JohnCompanies"
their main business for two decades has been datacenter virtualization. Individual developers don't care about it, sure, but it's a huge software business.
Workstation and fusion were never big money makers. They were more of a labor of love.
I joined VMware just after the release of Businessware 2.0 - which I agree was 14 years ago.
The big money maker was vmotion because it allowed datacenters to decouple the server from the underlying hardware. Ever after, the money was in the datacenter products.
correction: VSphere 2.0 not Businessware 2.0 (wrong company).
For some reason I could not edit my post so I had to reply to my post.
A few years ago, most of the US dev team for workstation was laid off in favor of a non-US team.
good point… I don’t think they’re billion dollar businesses though. Probably hundreds of millions? Hard to say as I don’t think VMware publishes this info
And has a lot of "similar to {thing I have actually heard of}"
It reminds me of the first episode of Saturday Night Live after the original 1975 cast all left. In the first episode, the new cast did a sketch in which they each described themselves as a version/variant of/similar to a member of the old cast.
(Everyone was fired after that season, except for Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo.)
I think both of those are free now for consumer usage, for at least a couple years now?
No not the Pro versions still
You covered SDN but they are also the leading SD-WAN vendor through their VeloCloud acquisition 7ish years ago. Workspace 1 is also the core for their SASE products (zero trust network access, secure web gateways, browser isolation etc) when tied with VeloCloud.
Yep I forgot about VeloCloud and SASE. It really is a beast of a company :-)
I run esxi on my (admittedly beefy), home server. It is a fantastic piece of software that can be completely controlled through a web browser. I can easily spin up a couple of VMs, interact with the install without having to use a remote virtual keyboard/video switch, and the whole thing is rock solid.
I could probably do a lot of the same thing with Linux itself, but the web interface is so nice, I'm keeping it as long as it continues to be free for home use.
You can do the same thing with Proxmox VE. IMO, Proxmox is a much better choice for stand-alone VM hosts. The UI alone is certainly miles better.
Where VMware shines is when you want to virtualize multiple datacenters and manage them all from a single browser window. Getting hundreds of hosts and datastores managed all under one vCenter umbrella all while eliminating single points of failure, while not trivial, is the bread and butter of VMware and it works very well once it's all up and running.
As Someone that runs Proxmox and ESXI.
That is hardly true.
The ESXI UI is vastly cleaner and more VM Focused. The network stack is easier to work with, and setting up passthrough is dead easy. A big plus to ESXI is how easy it is to export a VM and move it to another machine. The Export/Import method on Proxmox sucks, and all CLI. Plus there are a lot of premade VMware images out there that spool up in minuets on ESXI, getting them up and running on proxmox is a chore.
Proxmox is not bad if doing everything from scratch in Proxmox, and you don't need to move VMs arount.
Plus don't get me started on lack of a filebrowser on proxmox.
Performance is better with ESXI anyways. Only downside to ESXI is hardware limitations.
Proxmox fall down on Enterprise tooling and integration with other software enterprises use to run the business
Things like Monitoring Platforms, Backup Solutions (veeam), Automation tool kits (powershell), etc.
I like Proxmox, I use it personally, but in its current form I do not see how any medium or large enterprise that has is management tooling around VMWare could just drop in proxmox.
not super critical but is there a terraform provider for proxmox? I looked at proxmox a while back when building my home server but went with esxi free because of the community provider - https://github.com/josenk/terraform-provider-esxi
I’d be really interested in an “i used both” comparison between esxi’s free offering and proxmox for this sort of purpose. I imagine esxi might be more polished, but also more limited.
I've used both, though not for anything especially complicated. Your guess about the polish level is correct; ESXi blows Proxmox out of the water interface-wise, especially for some specific tasks like configuring networks or managing PCI passthrough devices. As far as "more limited" goes, I can't say I noticed much of a feature discrepancy, although being open and just sitting atop KVM, Proxmox doesn't have any of the artificial limitations imposed by VMware (like a cap on number of vCPUs in the free version, eugh).
One pretty big one, if you're looking at homelab use, is that Proxmox is just Debian, so it's waaaay more likely to run on crap-tier commodity hardware, whereas VMware has all the usual enterprise-level support commitments and so you're very much on your own if you try to force it to run on hardware that isn't on their official compatibility list.
> One pretty big one, if you're looking at homelab use, is that Proxmox is just Debian, so it's waaaay more likely to run on crap-tier commodity hardware
That was my first (and last) hurdle when wanting to try out ESXi...
I booted up the installer only to be greeted by a "not enough RAM" message. I believe it's 4GB minimum, which my tiny machine had, but ESXi read it as 3.9GB instead of 4.0GB and refused to budge.
Very happy with Proxmox on the other hand! Having access to the underlying Debian is also quite nice if you need to do something that's not supported by the interface.
Proxmox also has native container workload virtualization with LXC container support built right in and ZFS filesystem. Two killer features.
You are better off running a VM for dockers. That way that entire VM is portable.
The ZFS Filesystem is a nice feature
> Proxmox doesn't have any of the artificial limitations imposed by VMware (like a cap on number of vCPUs in the free version, eugh).
These were what i was thinking of yeah.
Excellent point on hardware support. I'm running several years old Xeon chips in my server, and ESXI is already complaining they might not be supported in a future release.
I use Proxmox and can do everything OP just described. I would assume the esxi is more polished, but I don't spend a heck of a lot of time on my hypervisor; mostly on what it's hypervising.
They have this VMware Tanzu platform which is like Red Hat Openshift. A heavily customized application packaging , deployment management solution on top of Kubernetes. It can be deployed on any cloud and on-prem DCs. So kinda multi cloud bet. They are selling it in a big way.
What does "They are selling it in a big way" mean? I've never heard of it, and neither have any of the software engineers who are next to me at the office. RedHat OpenShift also bombed. They had a great start 11 years ago, but then didn't innovate, and worse, released a 2.0 that wasn't backward compatible. They used the 2.0 release as an excuse to kick off all free plans. What a joke. There's a reason Red Hat isn't a leader in Cloud.
They also released a 3.0 and 4.0 of OpenShift that weren't backwards compatible :-)
Yet OpenShift is making bank. You'd be surprised how much money they make on AWS, Azure, and Google.
OpenShift is fantastic and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to any medium sized startup and up. I run it in my closet. Most medium sized startups end up building out an OpenShift-like K8s but they use 6 months to a year plus to do it.
Upgrades within major versions are totally painless, one-click affairs.
I have customers running Tanzu.
It is slick, but niche. Incredibly rock solid - in ways K8S is not - and you pay for it.
It is on its way out as a product.
Tanzu is a loaded term :) Are you talking about TAS (ex PCF) or TKG?
PCF
i wouldn't say it's on its way out. it's still in active development and very much supported
Why is it on its way out as a product? Is it simply not making money?
The scuttlebutt I hear is Kubernetes is stealing its lunch money.
Again, referring to what used to be PCF. Hence why the more modern Tanzu is K8s based.
PCF is still making bank but the industry has rallied around K8s. So growth has stalled but it has a happy customer base.
Unfortunately there’s no real equivalent (OpenShift is not really “it”) on K8s unless you’re assembling several products together with a lot of glue. Which is what everyone does, with varying quality.
They also offer tanzu as on prem cluster where you can somehow use kubernetes to provision kubernetes virtualised kubernetes clusters.
It uses cluster-api to provision clusters. It's very cool and isn't a VMware thing. It's open source, and you can easily run it on regular k8s clusters.
Well, Cluster API depends on underlying providers and the VMWare provider is definitely a VMWare thing as it's maintained by them:
https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-vsph...
Yes it is a community project but VMware engineers play a big part in maintaining as it is foundational to the kubernetes product that VMware sells. Open source does not mean it runs by itself.
They own a substantial chunk of the on-premises datacenter virtualization space. Loads of orgs still run their own kit, and VMWare makes some damn nice tools to squeeze the most from that investment. There are competitors in the space, but none with the breadth and depth of VMWare.
They still make the best virtualization software for OSX. I use it daily to run desktop Linux on OSX. Video drivers seem to be having a tough time with Electron apps these days, sigh.
vmware enterprise footprint and business still seems to chug along. most of the world markets lag behind hyperscale technology progress.
Working for a client of Broadcom, I can say that no, they don't understand how opensource works. Have a problem with one of their products which they blame on an upstream bug. They don't allocate an engineer to fix said upstream bug, supplied an workaround that didn't solve the problem just reduced number of occurrences and that's it.
Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX?
Taking driver code out of Linux and just running it inside the hypervisor has to be the most brazen violations possible.
> Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX?
If you mean, did they remove the vmkLinux layer from their product? Yes, they did, back in 2019 soon after they won the lawsuit on procedural grounds (the court ruled the person who brought the suit didn't have standing, and it was upheld on appeal).
It sounds like vmklinux is deprecated but still shipping for older drivers if I'm understanding their documentation. https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/04/what-is-the-impact-... vSphere 6.7 (which they're still supporting and shipping updates to as it was only released last June), includes the vmklinux driver stack.
For those reading along at home, that's a shim layer to link GPLed code into the closed source hypervisor.
It's absurd that the company responsible for some of the most blatant license violations in the industry (and is still actively continuing to violate after a decade) is trying to push itself as open source friendly.
How do you propose banning this while permitting open source drivers for Windows?
I understand why you might want to, I just don’t understand what the rule would be.
The key is in "derived from". Very few people would say NT is derived from some random drivers that nobody at Microsoft had a hand in writing. Taking existing code and having it form the foundation of a new kernel and claiming it as all closed source is quite a bit more obviously derived from that existing code open source code. "Derived from" is the core concept in the GPL; it actually doesn't use the word "link" at all.
Additionally they didn't publish the source to even the GPLed drivers they shipped as binaries, before even talking about the core hypervisor itself.
They did publish the source to the GPL drivers as well as to the vmklinux “adapter”, and I don’t believe either the core hypervisor or the ESX kernel were derived from or adapted from the Linux kernel.
My impression is mostly people are annoyed that VMware drafted off the Linux driver ecosystem and used it to help bootstrap a proprietary ecosystem.
Eventually (once they were successful) they published a native driver SDK and hardware vendors wrote native drivers for it.
To me this seems very similar to the way Linux had for a while a way to run Wifi drivers originally written for NT, though it didn’t lead to the year of the Linux desktop as some of us might have hoped for at the time.
The difference is that it was the original driver stack and the system didn't have a way to run at all without that Linux code until a handful of years ago.
The ndis drivers are the opposite, because the closed source parts weren't written by people even thinking about open source code. No one could say they were derived from Linux. And Linux had it's own network driver stack so saying that Linux was derived from NDIS would be a stretch too. Hell, I don't think NDISWrapper even was ever upstreamed.
You’re referring to the Console OS which they also did open source (it was just Red Hat, sources available upon request).
The relationship between the Console OS and the Vmkernel / hypervisor was very similar to the relationship between Windows/Linux/macOS and VMware Workstation/Fusion, which were also proprietary software not derived from any of those OSes.
No, I'm referring to the vmklinux driver stack which has always had the purpose of running GPLed code directly by hypervisor without the consoleos mediating access to hardware.
Also, does 'they' actually include 'you'? Googling your username seems to connect you with vmware code pretty intimately.
I thought they ripped the network stack from BSD.
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/381190-windows-tcpip-stac...
That's fair, I should have kept constrainig my statements to GPLed code. That being said, Microsoft complied with all of the license terms of that stack (basically shipping a copyright notice and constraining themselves on how they advertise it's use). If it was a GPLed stack and they never published source, I'd be saying the same thing about them that I'm saying now about VMware.
I can only hope they let VMware operate independently and continue growing like they've done in the past decade.
It is best to set your expectations extremely low for this type of acquisition. My personal opinion: Broadcom is _buying_ its way into the Enterprise technology space by hook or crook. When Broadcom acquires a company their M.O. is to immediately install finance-driven leadership and focus strictly on cost cutting measures coupled with accelerated profit-making endeavors. The only thing VMware employees have to look forward to in the near future are layoffs, all types of cost reductions, team consolidations (i.e. you do more work with less resources) and severely reduced R&D. And the only thing that VMware customers have to look forward to are increased VMware costs, more vendor lock-in, reduced satisfaction with support, and almost zero innovation.
Again, this is just my opinion so I could end up be wrong. Or maybe I am just in a bad mood today... meh
Not at all. Broadcom is well known to pimp up license and maintenance prices for all their sw portfolio while cutting fat and flesh in the process.
Disclaimer: forced Broadcom customer here
Bad mood i hope.
Should Broadcom do all those things, they run a substantial risk of degrading the products offered by VMware, which is a poor business decision.
Given the very profitable state of VMware, it's a lot more likely that they will only introduce minor changes.
So Broadcom is just a better run IBM? IBM buys whatever product it wants for a foothold, milks it, chucks it out.
It used to be Product X becomes Websphere Product X, then disappears from their salespeople's lips about 5 years later.
One thing that I always gave Dell/EMC credit for was that they at least outwardly seemed to have left VMware free to their own thing. As opposed to a lot of their other acquisitions that they bastardized in this rush to sell enterprises on everything private cloud. We'll see Broadcom ends up taking the same route.
Quite agree, Dell/EMC treated VMware as independent.
What does the upstream means?
Michael Dell will get $24bn! from this acquisition...It's fascinating how he turned around a struggling PC company (Dell Inc) into a financial engineering machine that made him tens of billions.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/18/how-wall...
So he Jack Welched his own corporation?
Jack Welch and his students turned companies into steaming piles of crap, not gold. GE, Boeing. A few people walk away with riches, however.
The Koolaid at Motorola was that they invented six sigma. Throw that on the fire too.
Good to hear that Dell’s schemes haven’t done the same to his own company. Would it be more accurate to draw a comparison to Masa Son? An entrepreneur in tech who ended up playing high stakes financial games with his company’s own money.
No one is as much of a gambler as Masa Son. Masa is not particularly evil or scheming - he is just nuts.
But did he know EMC's ownership of VMWare in 2016 was going to turn out to be such a stellar cloud performer, or was that just IP portfolio luck?
The VMWare market cap in 2016 was ~$32B, of course there's no objective way to answer your question definitely as yes or no but I'd say that VMWare was already at that point more than comfortably a more or less de-facto standard for virtualization.
Yeah but there was a big shift away from virtualization to cloud and micro services. As a former VMware admin I'm surprised VMware is doing as well as they are now. But maybe my view is just shaded by the bank I was working for that was moving away from it to AWS.
There isn’t really a big shift to cloud yet. Only 5% of all IT spend is on any cloud provider according to the CEO of Amazon and former CEO of AWS [1]
https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...
[1] Andy Jassy is my skip^9 manager.
Yep. This has been the sentiment shared by Google Cloud execs a lot too. All the players are looking at the 10-20 year picture with regard market share / spend (in an industry where no-one knows what compute infrastructure will look like by the middle of that period).
It's relevant that they are talking about VMware's security portfolio.
The vast majority of why people are VMware proponents is down to their virtualisation software. It's why we were big resellers for a while. But for the last few years, their own sales people have only wanted to talk about security products, quite plainly acknowledging stagnant growth in on premise virtualisation.
But virtualisation is in my view the only place they've made it big. You've just linked a Reddit post in /r/cybersecurity talking about security products and every reply is about how to replace ESXi. It'll be interesting to see how their future pans out.
This. Virtualisation has been commodified - cloud, kubernetes, docker, hyper-v, even virtualbox. Whereas securing a decade's worth of on-prem infrastructure is a real pain-point for enterprises.
VMware Workstation blew my mind when I saw it demoed in (I think) mid-2000 [1]. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was seeing - it seemed that revolutionary, running an OS inside an OS on a desktop. I wonder whether VMware's problem nowadays is that, having basically invented the technology, they've become almost synonymous with the category of virtualisation tech - kind of like "Hoover" for home appliances - and their other products get less attention.
(I know that VMware didn't invent the idea of virtual machines. But my perception is that at that time, virtualised OSs were mostly found in mainframes.)
I side with you on this one, I remember VMware being incredible. So much so it took Microsoft years to implement its own version of ESXI.
When people think of virtualisation, they think VMware as a key player in building and pushing the technology.
Like when you think of the first smartphone you think of the Apple iPhone, despite there being "smartphones" prior to its release.
>VMware's problem nowadays is that, having basically invented the technology,
IBM, actually, on mainframes.
> IBM, actually, on mainframes.
Yes, I noted that in my post. I guess I meant general purpose virtualisation running on general purpose, commodity hardware.
Back in the late 80s spent 18 months in a role where I was developing scientific software on an IBM System/36 under VM/CMS. While this system actually had a hypervisor (CP) running on the physical hardware, and itself running virtualised instances of the CMS OS, it never felt (in hindsight) like I was in a virtualised environment. It seemed more like being logged into a multi-user unix box where everything ran in the same kernel - perhaps because the mainframe virtualisation layer was completely invisible to me, and everyone on the mainframe saw the same OS.
But point taken.
I was running an x86 VM on my 16Mhz 68030 Mac LCII in 1996 in college - SoftPC by Insignia Solutions.
> I was running an x86 VM on my 16Mhz 68030 Mac LCII in 1996 in college - SoftPC by Insignia Solutions.
That's called emulation. That's not what VMWare does.
From the parent poster
> I genuinely couldn't believe what I was seeing - it seemed that revolutionary, running an OS inside an OS on a desktop
SoftPC was in fact “running an OS inside an OS on the desktop “
Yep, that's Broadcom's business model ... buy a business (VMWare), ignore its smaller customers, upsell the Fortune 500 on the product (VMWare) to push out competing solutions, and keep the line items on those Fortune 500 bills growing. It's worked for them I guess. I left a Broadcom acquisition before the takeover.
It’s kind of par for the entire enterprise market as a whole similar to the structural problems of b2b companies. SMBs are hard to serve effectively and the margins are slim, so you’ll see companies that are b2b move more toward SMB b2b (see: Best Buy although Apple is the clear exception here). Everyone chases the big accounts because the model is less risky no different than how there’s no shortage of luxury homes being built.
This feels way too pessimistic, VMware got big before open source virtualization took off.
I imagine someone could use docker instead of VMware in most cases, and if that's not possible then hire some people to make it so.
Vendor lockin is a scary thing, the people who are really going to hurt here are mega super corps who are now going to have to pay out the nose. If you're a smaller company, you should be moving to docker or another open source solution anyway.
VMware has a ton of product, none of them really competes with Docker. They do have Tanzu I suppose, but that more a Kubernetes offering.
I would argue that there are more Docker containers running on a VM, running on top of VMware than there are Docker containers running on bare metal servers.
Both VMs and containers can be used and misused in a number of ways, but rarely can you replace a VM on VMware ESXi with Docker. There's still a massive business case for VMware and the only real competitors are Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer (if it's still called that).
You also have to remember that there's a crazy big Microsoft world out there, Docker and containers still aren't of much use here. While this could run on Hyper-V, many just pick ESXi because it's what they know (No one was ever fired for choosing VMware).
Citrix Xenserver is now called Citrix Hypervisor and there was also a fork of Xenserver by a French company called Vates and they have an opensource version called XCP-NG. Vates offer support and other addons.
You can run Windows in Docker.
Ether figure it out now, or in 2 years when VMware starts to suck.
Then again, all the big companies I know put things off until the last moment.
If I was a better developer I'd be putting together a project right now that allows you to run all your happy legacy Windows software with Docker.
Shouldn't be hard to raise a bit of funding for such a project assuming you have the right background.
I'm running some in production. Windows containers are full of problems, gotchas, and caveats. It feels as though Microsoft has already abandoned it and moved on. Similar feelings with DSC and other modernization efforts for Windows. I believe their focus has entirely shifted to Azure and will slowly replace the Windows Server use cases with SaaS and PaaS offerings.
> You can run Windows in Docker
... on Windows. So it doesn't really mesh with a typical server environment.
Ok, use Windows Server as your host.
Or use Virtual Box on Ubuntu
Ever tried to manage 50.000 production vms? Whith a mix of applications which cannot be easily containerized... Vcenter, vrops, NSX, etc . You could reinvent, build in house. Or you can buy VMware with support. What would the regulator prefer?
But, this does offer incentive for outsiders to create competitive stacks.
This 1000%. And this applies to a huge percentage of very large orgs/ISPs/telecoms/fortune 500s, etc. VMware for the most part “just works” and is entrenched in these companies, much like AD.
If you are rolling your own replacement of VMware, what happens if a couple (or even say 20 out of your 5000) of your “parent” hosts go down. Will all of your guests auto-migrate to healthy hosts?
And we are not talking about Kubernetes or similar here. That is very different. You don’t roll your own VMware alternative. You just use VMware.
It's not purely a case of vendor lock-in, but that shouldn't be downplayed too much. Virtualization is still very much applicable for the legacy applications which are still prevalent. New apps may run in containers, but it's not just a few big companies running ancient legacy software.
When you refer to smaller company and mention docker, or open source, it's only those that are tech startups, or close to the field with the skill to operate in this fashion. The majority of small and medium companies don't have the skills or resources to do this. Over time that changes, but it's completely unrealistic to think that they can get away quickly from VMware (even when their overworked IT person would like to.)
Then we have a market for a nice UI wrapper around Docker which provides a display render.
You can run Windows in a docker container so this would support legacy applications.
I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not insurmountable. If all else fails, Virtual box is open source
> I imagine someone could use docker instead of VMware in most cases, and if that's not possible then hire some people to make it so.
It's been a few years since I've worked with bare metal, but doesn't Docker require a hypervisor for the containers?
You could swap to KVM or Hyper-V, but transitioning an org's hypervisor on bare metal is a massive task any way you cut it.
No hypervisor for cgroups (docker & friends), no. Which is why something like LXD/LXC outperforms hypervisor virtualization by quite a bit.
I was on a team that ran performance critical stuff for a reasonable sized ecommerce business - moving from vmware to bare metal was fantastic on every level from api’s to performance and reliability.
The enterprise spirit is stong in vmware.
No, Docker is not a hypervisor and doesn't use one unless you need to add one for security reasons; it uses Linux features to build containers. On the other hand, yes switching from virtual machines to containers it is likely to be a non-trivial workflow change and not something a company can do on a dime.
Currently, Docker only requires an hypervisor if you set it on Windows or MacOS.
No, docker doesn't require a hypervisor of any kind.
Linked by Reddit poster: https://kicksec.io/vmware-too-big-to-fail/
From the article:
> My hope is that Michael Dell vetos this merger, from my accounts of Michael and the people I know who are employed by Dell, Michael is a great leader and a good human being and that is the most important thing, not profit at any cost.
I don't know if the author is serious. This deal has Michael Dell financial engineering written all over it. He's not going to veto anything. Dell is all about enriching himself with moves like this rather organically grow a company.
> > Announcing the deal, Broadcom said the acquisition was part of its strategy to buy “established mission-critical technology businesses”.
> Seems like their software strategy is to buy a business which doesn't have much room to grow but is extremely entrenched, and then reduce staffing and raise prices as much as possible.
Why wouldn't you just post to the article directly, and bypass the horrible Reddit web site for the redirect?
Because the reddit post was also made by the author ? And he's responding to the comments there too?
Fair enough.
Install old reddit redirect on firefox
For anyone curious about potential open-source migration options given the prospect of uncertainty around VMware pricing and support:
- xcp-ng[1] is a support-available fork of XenServer. Migration[2] can be performed using export to OVA format and subsequent import into the built-in Xen-Orchestra interface.
- proxmox-ve[3] provides a management UI for Linux Virtual Machine (LVM) and Linux Containers (LXC) hosts and provides various vendor migration guides[4]. Both commercial and community support[5] is available.
- The Xen Hypervisor[6] is capable of hosting x86 and ARM virtual hosts, and their project provides a VMware migration guide[7]
[1] - https://xcp-ng.com/
[2] - https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migratetoxcpng.html#from-vmware
[3] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve
[4] - https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox...
[5] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/support
[6] - https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/
[7] - https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Migration_from_VMware
virt-v2v can import VMs from VMware to QEMU/KVM-based systems. https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html
There is also Openstack, oVirt, and LXD (does KVM now).
Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel based virtual machines.
> Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel based virtual machines.
It's not the lower level primitives here that are valuable from VMware, it's the higher level abstractions built on top of them that facilitate easier management and use by (relatively) less technical people.
You can give a "good at Windows" type technician a few hours of training and they can put together a usable vCenter deployment, including things like corporate SSO and such. They can drag and drop things around and it'll mostly work. And when things go wrong and this person is confused about what to do, they can call up support for help.
Obviously, this is centered on-prem, which is indeed shrinking - but a lot of orgs have a lot of investment in stuff running on site, and there are still plenty of cases where having e.g. lots of storage and enough compute to "process" it in some way physically close to office users can speed up their workflows.
This is basically were I work and probably 80% of small and medium enterprises. We bought a lot of licenses once and maintenance license cost is minimal so far.
So looks like they could be the last player on premise, like mainframes by IBM
VMware used to be centered around Virtualization until 2015-16 or so. Since then it has moved / expanded to Software defined Datacenters (technically virtualization, yes), Automation, Security (Carbon Black) and lately, K8s (with Tanzu). That does not mean a good chunk of revenue might still be from virtualization - FWIW, I do not have any idea on that.
Disclaimer: I am an ex-employee of VMware.
> Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud.
This is something that the HN crowd repeats as if it were an obvious axiom where no scrutiny is needed. While I'm sure it's true that there's a general movement towards cloud-based infrastructure, there is a very real and non-trivial part of the IT infrastructure of any country that will not move to the cloud in the coming decade, if it ever will. This general movement is not the same thing as "everything will eventually have moved".
The hypothesis that on-site virtualization somehow is an obviously dying technology assumes that it must be true that on-site hosting will stop existing, which I have a very hard time believing. If nothing else (and there are plenty of "elses"), strict data security and privacy concerns will keep on-site hosting moated for a long time.
Not a fan of vmware (I used to work there) but pretty much no one currently can compete with VMware’s full product line and optimizations
Azure uses Hyper-V under the hood not kvm. Its also not built on Linux.
Okay, yes, Microsoft Azure running Microsoft Windows virtualization isn't shocking. They have to dogfood, or they'll be laughed at hard.
Nobody laughs when MS uses Linux.
Would it be to compete with one of their own product in such a major way and despite the integration MS did for Linux guests running on Hyper-V, yeah people would laugh. Not about them using Linux. About them having Hyper-V. Like we laughed about Visual SourceSafe.
I was under the impression each of those had custom hypervisors? While perhaps still Linux that doesn’t seem like a commodity.
They're 'custom', but are heavily derivative of KVM in the case of AWS (Nitro) and GCP. Azure runs a fork of Hyper-V, AFAIK.
AWS' Hypervisor is Nitro.
Which is based upon KVM - AIUI.
https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-sy...
I also don't see any obvious synergies with a company that specializes in network chips.
It's so sad to see good integrated tech products being bought out just so the market can squeeze it and its customers dry of money, leaving nothing but a dry soulless husk of finance-driven leadership squeezing blood from desperate vendor-locked customers, just so swarms of consultants can move everyone that can afford them off onto the next integrated product to rinse and repeat.
The current solution to business management feels suboptimal. If companies are like persons maybe they should be organized with a more integrated 'body', where the 'head' doesn't have total power to sell out the rest of the integrated parts for its own gain. Co-op like organizational structures might avoid this issue, for example.
So far I have only used Automic Automation from Broadcom. I found it supremely crappy. Its UI brings back memory of (I guess now defunct) IBM Websphere. But it is now an "Enterprise Solution" so it has to shoved down developer's throat with full force.
Just like analysts said IBM brought RedHat mainly for Openshift platform and I think there is some truth to it. Seems Broadcom has brought VMWare for their Tanzu platform which is direct competitor of Openshift. It is less about virtualization in corporate data centers which many agree here is legacy business at this point.
VMWare is being passed around like the village bicycle.
Holy crap! Look at these acquisitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware#Acquisitions
Those are companies that VMware acquired, not companies that acquired VMware.
Whoops! Totally misunderstood that page. Thanks for pointing it out.
I have a very different view on this purchase, and I f my thesis is right, then it just might be the best move ever ( Michael Dell has certainly won again with this deal.) Here is my vie, VMware has become the OS of the private cloud. Sure Linux based, but from an enterprise perspective, VMWAre is closer to the HW than any other OS. Considering that Broadcom is a HW company, and that they are looking to fend off Qualcomm, Amd, and Intel as key competitors, should they move to build ARM or RISK-V based server for the enterprise, they could be at a mejor advantage on those CPU architecture. Just a thought from over the pond, but they could buy Ampere and be in that market very well positioned to take in the Enterprise space end to end, they would only need storage if you don’t consider VSAN as a valid solution in that space. Tim will tell.
I can't say it's not possible, but Broadcom (the corporation, not the semiconductor division within Broadcom) acts more like a holding company. I'd make a comparison to private equity but the goal there is typically to flip the company for a profit. Broadcom's goal is typically to milk high-margin sales for established companies. Purchase, identify the most profitable parts, and cull everything else. Their MO is typically not strategic acquisitions for innovation. If any of their acquisitions can be called strategic it would be in how much the company's top customers align with Broadcom's, which allows them to increase vendor lock-in and jack the price.
It might be the hypervisor and related ecosystem of private cloud today, but I wouldn’t bet $61B on VMWare against the entire field (xen/kvm in Type 1, and all the container solutions) for 2027.
Who's Tim?
I believe he meant "Time will tell". Or Tim can come and tell us, up to Tim.
"to speed up its expansion into the enterprise software business."
Why does a chipmaker want/need to expand into enterprise software? Shouldn't they be expanding to making different chips?
In 2021 Broadcom semiconductor revenue was $18.8B out of $27.5 billion. Broadcom has a large portfolio of enterprise software offerings.
The web page for their software offerings is at https://software.broadcom.com/ . The interesting thing you'll notice is that they do not list any specific software they offer (e.g. Symantec for enterprise security, which by the way is separate from Norton now). Rather they sell you on their ability to deliver on four specific enterprise functional needs.
They won't answer your call to buy their suite unless you're in the Fortune 500. They will try to sell you on their whole suite. They will upsell you on any new acquisition, eg VMWare.
They might renew my personal VMWare Fusion license for another year but would probably close that down soon for not being core. On the M1 I've moved on anyway to UTM.
EDIT: word choice
The cool thing about UTM is that it runs hardware virt and emulation, so you can run x86 on M1, which Vmware Fusion cannot do.
x86 on M1 through Qemu is very slow though. Not really usable to run Windows 10 in good conditions, for example (good news is that this is rarely needed, Windows on Arm running x86 and x64 programs seems quite good)
Broadcom likes to buy big companies with big moats that trade at a reasonable multiple because they have a mature growth profile. There are no more chip companies left with that profile except Qualcomm, which they tried to buy, and maybe Intel although their moat is fading. So they pivoted to software.
IIRC Broadcom was sold to an equities group some years ago, so it's not really broadcom the chip manufacturer...but rather an investment company for tech
Pairing virtualization software tech with hardware chipsets that directly support it seems like a good plan.
I think this is the play. They can create or influence standards that favor their new position - build vertical integration where others in this space cannot.
Absolutely not.
You’re thinking that Broadcom acts as a company with a technological vision. This is a totally not the case and the CEO is very open about that.
Today’s Broadcom is a company that optimizes the financial performance of technology assets.
There are no long term plans.
Wouldn't that be an abuse of monopoly though? If VMware suddenly starts supporting broadcom hardware better than other enterprise hardware.
You could call it that. But it's also industry practice.
Why not both? There's no reason NOT to get into enterprise software. You have hundreds of sales people selling chipsets to enterprise and you're telling me it would be dumb not to have them increase their attach rate?
Tens of thousands of sales people.
Because they want something that’s not affected by the chip shortage.
No, that is just incorrect. Please don’t speculate if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
This was reported by multiple financial news organizations, what makes you so confident it isn't true?
I am very confident this is not true. I am certain I know Broadcom’s corporate strategy and views on the semi cycle better than any financial journalist.
I think you misunderstand the point of HN, that is basically the only thing that occurs here.
I know, but if someone just flat out makes something up I’d hope they’d hedge their language a little bit.
Because corporate capitalism and investors expect ever higher returns. So a company that does good at what it does needs to look at new revenue sources to please investors which after a while just does mediocre at everything.
I don't understand the stock market. VMW at $50B market cap equates to ~$120 per share. The Broadcom acquisition is for ~20% more, and yet, the stock price is at $120, not... $145 or something.
Can someone more financially literate (or with direct experience in the stock market) explain this discrepancy to me?
(comment made at ~9:33am ET, stock market opened a few minutes ago)
If the stock is trading at $120/share that means everyone who owns stock (and is paying attention and offering it for sale) won’t sell for less than $120. But that doesn’t mean all of them, or even most of them, would sell for $120. Many of them probably believe their stock should be worth more than $120 and expect the price to go up in the future. So if you want to buy out the whole company you have to pitch a price high enough that a majority of shareholders (or the board of directors as their fiduciary proxy) agree to sell at that price. This is basically guaranteed to be a substantially higher price than whatever the current market price is, because if the average shareholder didn’t expect the stock price to go up, why are they holding shares?
As the deal becomes increasingly likely to go through, the stock price will likely gradually shift up to match the deal price.
"Under the terms of the agreement, which has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, VMware shareholders will elect to receive either $142.50 in cash or 0.2520 shares of Broadcom common stock for each VMware share. The shareholder election will be subject to proration, resulting in approximately 50% of VMware’s shares being exchanged for cash consideration and 50% being exchanged for Broadcom common stock. Based on the closing price of Broadcom common stock on May 25, 2022, the total $138.23 per-share consideration represents a 44% premium to the closing price of VMware common stock on May 20, 2022, the last trading day prior to media speculation regarding a potential transaction, and a 32% premium to VMware’s unaffected 30-day volume weighted average price (VWAP). Upon closing of the transaction, based on the outstanding shares of each company as of the date hereof, current Broadcom shareholders will own approximately 88% and current VMware shareholders will own approximately 12% of the combined company on a fully diluted basis. " [1]
1. The deal might not go through, or the terms might change.
2. You might not be able to get 100% cash for your shares.
[1] https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/e...
Your instincts are right, it's just that the price jump happened on Monday when the talks were reported in the press over the weekend. It jumped from ~$95 on the Friday close to $115 on the open, ~20%.
Would guess they’re high-fiving at Parallels right now.
VMWare Fusion on M1 was already way behind (to an absurd point: it has been > 1 year 1/2 after the M1 launch, and VMWare has not yet launched a release of Fusion for it, only betas, and they do not target Windows). Overwhelming most of VMWare business is about other products anyway.
I’ve been going back and forth every few years between Fusion and || Desktop. I’m currently on a || swing. I guess I’ll be staying here for a while.
Probably an insignificant detail when considering the entire portfolio of subsidiaries and services under VMWare, but I guess there are some pretty notable projects included in this acquisition.
Especially from the Pivotal portfolio such as RabbitMQ, GreenPlum, Spring, Hibernate, etc... although I'm sure most here couldn't care less about Spring related projects.
Hibernate isn't part of the Pivotal portfolio. I'm sure there are contributions by Pivotal employees, but the core Hibernate engineering team is employed by Red Hat, who also own the trademark, etc.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and used to be part of the Hibernate team
Ah yes, now I recall!
I had concerns that Vertx was bundled into that portfolio too, but RH to rescue again.
I do, and this was what sprung to my mind.
I feel like Pivotal has been doing a great job lately - especially with Spring. I'd hate to see Broadcomm mess with this, but it feels highly possible.
We are a tiny bootstrapped startup. Spring is critical for us and we rely on RabbitMQ. This news is concerning to say the least.
I gather they own Symantec as well, how did that go for them? $61bn is a full price to be paying at this stage of the market.
I've no idea how well the Symantec acquisition worked for Broadcom, but it was particularly painful for anyone using Symantec products.
The ordering/renewal process was so messed up by the transition that for approximately 18 months it was almost impossible to get a quote or place an order, even to renew an existing subscription, long enough that Symantec started just giving out subscription extensions to tide people over until the order process worked again.
Not sure I understand the expected synergies here. Broadcom's main business is making embedded chips for networking and storage devices. Is this just a pure diversification play?
>Is this just a pure diversification play?
Probably. 6 months ago they were looking at acquiring SAS (which didn't go anywhere). The core competencies for that of those companies are even less related to what Broadcom does.
yes consider Broadcom bought Symantec.
Do these type of transactions ever end up well for either the acquirer or the acquired company?
EMC bought VMware for $650 million and Dell bought EMC for $74 billion and now sold VMware for $61 billion so it worked out for someone.
The EMC purchase of VMware was probably one of the best tech acquisitions of all time. At least financially. You can reasonably argue whether VMware's overall trajectory was better or worse as a result; in any case, most of the original leadership team ended up departing.
Someone knew something - that's an insanely low valuation for a major player in the (then just starting) virtualization market.
But at the time virtualization was considered as something "to keep that old Windows NT server/software running" - not foundational for all cloud services ever.
As an IT industry analyst at the time, it may seem like a cheap acquisition today, but it was seen as pretty rich at the time. I'm not sure how many people appreciated how big a deal VMware was. My understanding is Diane Greene didn't want to sell but the VCs wanted their exit. And she was eventually pushed out when VMware hit it big and she was excessively chafing under EMC control.
> Someone knew something
A broken clock is right twice a day, and even EMC CEO Joe Tucci was right once in his lifetime.
But don't look at his other acquisitions.
Hmm.. EMC (which essentially was Smoking Joe T as the CEO for most its limelight years) did quite well with acquisitions, Data Domain, Isilon, VMware and many more smaller acquisitions. They never bought a company to inherit their cash flow but saw an opportunity to invest and grow their business by adding their amazing sales machinery which was stellar as well.
The Data General acquisition, which got them CLARiiON, arguably saved the company during the downturn--given that belt-tightening really hurt Symmetrix sales.
The more important question is whether these type of acquisitions end up well for the customer or the employees. And in that case, I think the answer is rarely yes.
The point of massive acquisitions are to enrich company stockholders (generally the CxO's and key management), lock up key engineering talent from the market, and give the manager who lead the acquisition a fat bonus. Generally, everyone else loses. To offset the cost, typically value is extracted from the bought company until the product's value dies. Short term-wise, the people involved will get a lot of money and be gone by the time the consequences cannot be ignored.
That said, acquisitions can work if there is due diligence. I'm in a company that has acquired several companies in a related field. Each of the companies have had complementary products, and the cultures were vetted to be similar ours before purchase, ie small groups (30-50 people) who have demonstrated high skill, high trust, and low ego. Finally, there has been an effort keep groups generally autonomous while finding ways to synergize employees and services. There has been a strong feeling of working together. Groups have been willing to share their expertise and experience with other.
I guess in other words: the acquisition is a good idea, even if a product is subsumed into another product, there is plenty of real work to go around for employees to do. If you have to promptly fire people "because redundancy," it wasn't being done to improve your position in the field.
> Do these type of transactions ever end up well for either the acquirer or the acquired company?
It depends on what you mean by "end up well" and who, exactly, is meant by "acquirer" and "acquired". Yes, they're lucrative and worthwhile from the point of finance people, a rarified sliver of stake-holders and the law firms who buzz around to service all these. If they weren't you would not be seeing them as much.
From the point of view of technology advancement, the professionals who want to actually WORK in these domains, and the customers who depend on the products? No. These mergers/acquisitions are at best a mixed bag and more often a downgrade, or worst of all, a career-derailing adjustment.
I think Trello and Atlassian went well (massively different scale, though). I think the rep is that Atlassian mainly does well by leaving the companies alone as independent organizations, more like investment positions rather than actually merging the tech.
20 years ago when I was part of a company that was acquired the executives told us that only 1 in 4 were successful, but they were determined to make us one of the successful ones. (it wasn't)
I have no idea if the 1 in 4 number is correct, but it feels reasonable.
Yes. See Oracle.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/market...
Not fair to compare software companies to a law firm.
More than half of acquisitions and mergers fail, depending on the industry.
Can anyone explain how VMware's stock jumped from $90 to $120 on May 23rd before this was announced? How did people know this was going to happen 3 days before anyone of us heard of it?
It's been reported before: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-22/broadcom-...
Insider trading... but the very people who are supposed to be preventing this are involved in thr same thing all the time.
There are various stages of this beyond the plain illegal. Some people watch secondary signs like private plane travel data, for example.
There were rumours around, I think I even saw them on HN.
It is unlikely but if Broadcom boots out SpringBoot and associated crapola from their portfolio, it could be a win for decent developers in this otherwise bad acquisition.
I think this is actually great news. After acquisition the conglomerate level scale will slow innovation. Freeing up opportunity for talented folks to start companies in the space in the areas that are being underserved by Goliath. In addition, these types of deals prove liquidity to financiers creating precedent for financing young upstarts.
I wonder if this will have knock-on repercussions into the JVM stack, since VMWare owns Pivotal, and Pivotal create Spring.
Yeah this has me a little concerned, but only a little at this time. The only reason I'm not feeling any major anxiety yet is due to the ubiquity of Spring libraries/frameworks/products. They're everywhere used by thousands of companies, so it would be unlikely that this acquisition would have any dramatic changes for Spring. Perhaps a change in ownership or governance will occur, but hopefully there will be little or no impact.
I was hoping an independent VMware might recapture some of what it lost during the Dell years, but they still produce a solid product that I generally enjoy working with. Not sure if Broadcom is going to make the situation much better though.
This deal sounds like it is great for C-suites and investors. I don't know if it's great for the employees. My guess is that there will be a lot of cost cutting moves soon.
I wonder if VMware Fusion will get worse or better, because it got so bad I switched to Parallels. This was after being a customer for a long time.
This could be bad news for all the great researchers that moved to VMware after Microsoft closed their Silicon Valley research division…
One thing I've noticed is that M&A activity really picks up just before a downturn.
It's just a gut feeling, I have no data to back it up.
I mean...how do you define downturn?
If you mean recession, as defined by two consecutive quarters of dropping GDP - if GDP drops, stock markets drop. Not sure the directionality there, but the two are usually part and parcel.
If stock prices drop, it's a great time for acquisitions if you're sitting on cash.
I suspect any time stock markets drop sufficiently, you'll see increased M&A activity, regardless of whether it is prolonged enough to count as a recession.
Opinion: VMWare’s customer’s will loudly object to the FTC and this will not happen.
RIP Spring
Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by <40 yr olds ever paying $100k+ a year to VMWare, Symantec, Oracle, ...
To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly
Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them.
Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Since software isn't their core business, they pay an external company to keep their software running. Like it or not, cloud providers are for software companies, and most companies have no interest in becoming a software company. They might have some small groups that do analytics or software in-house, and those groups might use cloud providers, but all the essential software will be run by a company you can call when something breaks, or if you're big enough embeds some staff in your office.
It's just good sense to outsource non-core functions. Software companies outsource hosting and datacenter stuff to AWS, etc. Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
but thats just it, this argument only ever works if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing. You make eggs, and your target fixation only allows you to see eggs, so these companies hold some mysterious value to you.
KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory minimums for hardware support on network switches and servers. Cockpit makes it dead simple to run.
Oracle performance is so awful the license terms do not allow you to release performance benchmarks or comparative analysis against other databases. it also has all the same heavy lifting you need to focus on for things like galera clusters or postgres, so theres no clear win unless you like paying Larry for the privilege of slow transactionals on a hyperconverged iron beast, or youre too lazy to figure out ODBC.
And Symantec so openly hates their customers they now bundle a cryptominer with their software. before that their incompetence was so blinding Google had to step in and force them to give up their CA business.
"enterprise" software is an absurd proposition for anyone smart enough to realize their business is more than just the end product. to everyone else, these companies are borderline predatory.
> KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare
Do you have any sources for this? I worked at a company developing NFV appliances, we always had much higher network throughput on VMware than we did using KVM without using some type of convoluted vswitch alternative or PCI passthrough.
VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD, delegate different permissions and roles to users/groups, manage upgrades, interact with PowerShell and other APIs, it has integration into Dell and Cisco solutions, all sorts of additional features you won't find running CentOS and KVM without adding more 3rd party software on top and cobbling it together.
> VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD, delegate different permissions and roles to users/groups, manage upgrades, interact with PowerShell and other APIs, it has integration into Dell and Cisco solutions, all sorts of additional features you won't find running CentOS and KVM without adding more 3rd party software on top and cobbling it together.
This is it, really. For big companies this kind of stuff is important.
And "cobbling it together" is very much understating the effort involved to keep it running: eventually you'll upgrade one of the components and it will break something, because you didn't read the release notes of an upstream dependency that mentioned a breaking change that affects your particular setup.
Having the vendor (vmware) provide this as a delivered, tested, supported solution is so much easier.
Similarly, I suspect it would be significantly simpler to find IT firms and/or hire individuals with VMware knowledge than it would be to find the equivalent on KVM + Cockpit + the dozen other components you need.
Note: I'm not saying this is right or the way things should be, but simply pointing out the "enterprise" perspective. Boring technology is safe.
Same. VMware leagues better than the various horrible Openstack deployments some customers want to use.
I have in depth knowledge of kvm and the issue isn’t kvm it’s everything else.
colour me unimpressed. VMWare cheerleaders haul out openstack as their touchstone example of how hard VM's are in linux but forget that VMWare pales in comparison to what Openstack is, which is an entire full-stack cloud hosting provider with accounting, DNS, tenant metering and network delegation, and support for k8s.
Start comparing VMWare against Proxmox, which is an out of the box solution anyone can use and includes every single feature of ESX and many vsphere features youd easily lose your shirt for. https://www.proxmox.com/en/
heres an independent performance test. KVM is easily faster than ESX.
You've missed the point a bit, and for the record I prefer to deploy Proxmox/KVM over VMware most of the time, I'm not a VMware cheerleader.
There are plenty of features Proxmox doesn't have that VMware does have. I've ran into a few of them
1. No ability to pin vCPUs to physical CPUs from within Proxmox. You have to drop to bash and set affinity for each vCPU's PID by hand if you want that.
2. You can't provision a VM with more vCPUs than physical CPUs. For example if I have a host with 8 cores, the max vCPU I can allocate to a VM is 8. And yes, I did have a use case for this.
3. You can't configure networked serial ports from within Proxmox. You have to drop to bash and edit the vm configuration file by hand if you want that.
4. Lack of serial port concentrator, which means you can't really use networked serial ports reliably when migrating VMs across hosts in a Proxmox cluster. In the NFV world this can be pretty important.
5. You can't manage multiple Proxmox VM hosts from a single UI unless they're clustered, which in many cases isn't practical to do. vSphere will let you manage multiple independent hosts from a single pane of glass.
6. (at least historically) lack of RSS/multiqueue in virtio networking. vmxnet3 on VMware supports this and allows you to scale better. But I will admit it's been several years since I've had a look at this area.
Again I'm not a VMware cheerleader. I'm sure I could generate a list like this for what Proxmox has that VMware lacks. But it's incorrect to state that it includes every single feature of ESX.
I've deployed the full VMware Integrated OpenStack running on ESXi, NSXT, and network attached storage; everyone was happy. Users happily deploying full stacks via API in their own Tenant with tools like Terraform. Operators thrilled to be able to patch and reboot a host without even a notification email because VMware Live Migration. The bosses without a worry because in the end it's just running on VMware.
Expensive as hell though.
You don’t grok “the enterprise”. Any CTO of a large company would feel much better about having VMWare behind them and their ecosystem than your proposed solution.
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” applies equally to big enterprise SaaS providers and companies like Oracle, Microsoft, VMWare, Salesforce, etc.
I learned this lesson in an interview once. I was bullish on sap pricing and the cost of consultants. The person from top management, multi-billion chemical, said “you think we have no money”? They did, 2 years later they’ve opened a brand new building to fit a 1000 of those consultants.
Proxmox provides enterprise support staffed mostly by devs and engineers, and not some crappy outsourced service asking you the three questions from their predefined support handling sheet.
It is also deployed in many many enterprise and government settings.
Again, you’re arguing about technology which is besides the point. A CTO in the enterprise is going to make the safe choice.
Also, notice when you go to VMWare’s home page you see “referenceable clients” - ie well known companies that use the software? This is “Enterprise Marketing 101”.
Besides, I can throw a stick and find someone who knows VMWare. As a (hypothetical) CTO of a non tech company, I don’t want “support”, I might want an MSP to do it for me.
This is my first reply to you, so how can I argue against your point again? Also it seems I can count myself lucky to work under a chief technology officer that actually thinks about technology and also understands actual benefits, not the ones just looking at the gardner quadrant of "who paid the most for pr". Besides that:
How vmware is a safe choice is beyond me, their proprietary so one is mostly locked in and at their bidding, their standard support reply is to install from scratch as otherwise the won't look at the setup. If you don't look at the technology POV (in addition to others) the choices probably won't be the best.
Notice how on Proxmox.com there's a testimonial page that links to enterprise and gov't customers, how's that different "Enterprise Marketing"?
Proxmox also has reseller partner all over the world: https://proxmox.com/en/partners/reseller
So we got enterprise support, world wide enterprise reseller network, enterprise features available for all, with or without support, not sure how much more enterprise vibes one can get..
vmware isn't really moving forwards since a while, the acquisition by broadcom won't help that either IMO, but sure they're currently still able to pay "bribe" some CTOs or sales people lunch, so they got that edge going for them, won't be enough to stay the #1 in the long run though.
This gets back to the other boogeyman “lock in”.
The average corporation is dependent on 110 SaaS offerings.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233538/average-number-s...
No matter what it is a pain to migrate. Corps aren’t being bribed. They are making the safe choice.
For instance even if some unknown cloud provider is “better”, if something goes wrong, the CTO is going to be questioned. If Azure goes down and it’s already an MS shop, people aren’t going to question whether it was a bad decision.
I agree with you - and you are still missing the point. The enterprises are buying a service. They don't care that it is running on AHWRGGG instead of TLMWBBB (which is soooo much better). What they care about is that it runs, and when it doesn't, that someone fixes it. This is it. Could you run everything on PostgreSQL instead of Oracle? Yes, take a look at EnterpriseDB. I guess Oracle just sells better? (guessing here, no idea)
The money is of course important, but these providers are smart. They take only what they can and not more. Which is still big money. And while Oracle & co. would never make it into any company I can make a decision for, I don't think that keeps them awake at night - there are enough (big!) fish in the ocean.
Where you get screwed is when some legacy system of record application requires Oracle. So you think, I'll cheat and use Postgresql with an Oracle dialect. Then you find out the application uses tens of thousands of lines of PL/SQL including some of the most obscure features. Now you're looking at millions of dollars to get off the database software you don't like. Oracle, IBM, etc can buy time like this but eventually all the proponents of their software will be retired and the halls of IT will be filled with an army of "never again."
We meet on Wednesdays; the coffee and cookies are free.
You could run everything on Xen instead of VMware, except as you point out - you can't really. Oracle is similarly positioned. Their database software is just one piece of a much larger ecosystem of products. An "enterprise solution", if you will. Oracle actually competes with VMware in the broader enterprise space.
> if you dont care about performance or features
Bingo! If you are a manufacturing company, you care about two things:
1) does this software do the job I need?
2) does this software cost less than the value I get out of using it?
If the answer is "yes and yes" then -- congratulations! you made a sale!
Sure, if some other company comes in and says "hey, I can do the same job, but cheaper," the customer would listen. But so long as the software works good enough, then the externalities of support contracts, billing, "enterprisey-stuff" may matter more than features or performance.
>if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing
I don't except to the degree that the product is more or less suitable for my business needs. And note I said product, which KVM by itself is not. If I'm going to use KVM--and, yes, I likely would rather than VMware unless I otherwise needed VMware for some reason--I'd be buying it as part of a supported commercial Linux distribution.
Would you suggest that all companies write their own office suites? Manage their own SSO solutions? Manage their own mail servers? Manage their own expense system (Concur)? Manage their own payroll (ADP)? Every small company manage their own benefits (Insperity)? Do whatever Workday does?
The health care organizations overwhelmingly use third party EHR/EMR systems and schools use third party companies for enrollment (Blackboard).
It doesn’t make sense to bring any those in house.
No, it only ever works if you care about your core competencies more than performance or features of the software products you run your business on.
Remember, not only are most non-software companies better at their business than they are at software, they're also not hiring from the same tech talent pool, they're not paying their tech people as much, they're not letting the tech run their business.
lulwut?
I've got several clients that pay over 500k/year to a SaaS ERP vendor. The ERP system is the very definition of enterprise software.
What would you suggest I advise my clients when it comes to their finance, inventory, order management, logistics etc?
I guess they could piece together various SaaS solutions to create some sort of composable microservice based system to meet their needs but that's a massive engineering overhead when they can just get all of the functionality they need on one big fat enterprise ERP system.
The cosmetics manufacturer I work with does not care about what the technologists (people like you and me) care about. They just want to run their manufacturing and wholesale operation and if Oracle are offering one system that does it all, why wouldn't they take that deal?
Exactly. Most "enterprise" software competes with a team of 3 doing it all in excel. At this rate, $100k/yr is a bargain.
I do ERP and the thought of replicating it in Excel… yikes. For a big company you’ll need a team of hundreds and a huge surplus of sanity, and you’ll still have a worse outcome.
An ERP is basically a database with an interface with business logic built in. Certainly not something you want to do in Excel.
When people talk enterprise they are talking 2000+ person companies. They are not doing their ERP payroll etc using excel.
> Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
Not just Linux but IT in general. It may have to be about security; my impression is that at least some of the widespread successful attacks in recent years might have been prevented if non IT companies had their own IT department, servers and in house security teams. Relying on an external provider is cheap and comfortable, until the day a single vulnerability screws all its customers data in a single day.
> if non IT companies had their own IT department
I think you vastly underestimate the cost of on-prem IT, especially for small and medium sized businesses. The "floor" cost of your own IT is many, many orders of magnitude higher than a subscription to something like Office 365 for something like 50 people.
"Normal" people don't use cloud services because they're lazy, they do it because the economics of rolling your own IT does not make sense, and hasn't since the days when it stopped being your only option.
Having your own It department doesn't mean you'll be fine for security. Plenty of health systems have their own IT department and have been hit.
But, even thinking of health care systems is thinking of big businesses. How does a road construction company justify an IT department or security team? Think of businesses like that. They have have an IT guy who manages services they use and is an expert at using those.
Most businesses are small to medium in size and non-tech.
I work in this area and it’s the opposite.
Small businesses with in house It get hacked waaaaasy more.
> but needs software to run its business
In this case, they have no need for VMWare or Oracle.
Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to, which allows them to float through their careers fairly unchallenged.
At one point in time, IBM had this market position. Then Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon and Google.
> Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to
Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable?
If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that businesses buying the Google Apps suite is nonsensical, because the only reason you'd ever use Google is because you're a "careerist" that "only know" Google.
That's obviously not true, Gmail and the rest of the Google suite have been market-leading for many years, because they are good solutions that solve real problems. Presumably the same thing goes for the Microsoft Office suite, and so on.
People are now starting careers as Office 365 "officers". From now until retirement, they will champion Office 365 and its successors in all situations, because in effect they will be championing their own CVs.
Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on.
If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365 makes no difference.
The insight is that the careerists are the effective insider salesmen of enterprise software. Not specs, benchmarks, stats or anything like that.
Why can’t multiple things be true at the same time?
The idea of product “officers” can be bizarre and counter productive, while that product simultaneously can be one of the best in the market.
I’m not saying that O365 is great, I use it at work and I hate it, but enterprise software has always been like this: it’s not enough to be better, you need to be something like 3x better, but if you are it doesn’t matter if you’re going up against Microsoft. Software is a lot more competitive in that way than a lot of other industries.
The pain occurs because of the symbiosis between technical lock-in and careerists.
If a tech company has achieved both technical and organizational lock-in (or maybe "capture"), specs don't matter.
It doesn’t matter if Google Apps itself is superior. Google is not exactly known for its enterprise support. You also can’t count on the long term focus of Google. You know when you buy into the MS ecosystem you are going to get great enterprise support, they don’t have the attention span of a crack addled flea like Google does, it’s going to integrate well with the rest of their products, you get deep discounts from bundling.
Specs and benchmarks only matter to geeks.
Gmail is a market leader only because it is good enough (and at the start it was even better than competition) and because it was free - and still is for some cases. Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them.
Otherwise, I'm not sure I would put Google in the mix with Oracle / MS and others. They are firmly non-enterprise, in that it is notoriously difficult to get any support from them, even if you are paying (there are exceptions, yadda yadda...). With Oracle, their products may suck (and they do), but the company knows to answer the phone for their customers, otherwise they won't be able to sell that beefy contract in a few months' time.
> Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable?
Oracle? Lol.
> Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them.
> They are firmly non-enterprise
So you acknowledge you don't really have knowledge of the core enterprise suite Google sells to enterprises, but at the same time you're certain they're non-enterprise?
Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps) is absolutely enterprise. They definitely have enterprise support contracts, and the few times I've had issues while having a support contract they have been easy to work with.
> Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps.
You hit the nail on the head why enterprises stay away from Google. They are going to lose focus on it as soon as no one internally can justify maintaining it to enhance their careers and show “scope” and “impact”.
They've been selling Google Workspace for 16 years. Its one of the biggest MDM platforms out there. ~~There are over 2 billion users of this paid enterprise suite.~~ Guess I was wrong on that figure, >2 billion users with >6 million paid subscriptions.
Those are non paid users
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...
> As of March 2020, there were 6 million paid customers, according to Google’s most recent publicly available stats.
Ah, I misread their announcements.
There's still supposedly over 2 billion users of these services. Its not a small project with a niche client set where absolutely nobody pays. Reader was popular, but not 2 billion users popular. How many people do you think really used Allo? Its really not in the same space as the many products they've killed.
It matters because Microsoft uses its much larger paying installed based to support a slew of first party and third party companies to provide “enterprise support”. They have hundreds of people in sales that report back to MS what large enterprises want.
People on HN don’t grok “the enterprise”.
I mentioned in another post, that even though I work for $BigTech, I work in the cloud enterprise consulting space (not Azure). Dealing with the enterprise is a completely different beast than dealing with other tech companies. Microsoft has almost four decades of experience in the space.
Even on the personal side, I would much rather deal with MS for my one lonely 5 person Office365 subscription than Google support.
I don’t have direct experience with administrating Oracle, but my impression is that they make a lot of money from the moats they’ve built: but they would never have been able to build them if the product was garbage to begin with. Sure, nobody would probably pick Oracle today for a new project almost regardless of size, but surely there must have been a point in time when Oracle was simply superior when it came to stability and functionality? If not, their current size really makes no sense, because you can’t build a business on scamming people in the long run.
5 - 10 years back, Oracle was very far ahead of the database game and there was no practical competitor regarding performance, query optimization, storage management and enterprisey management features. For quite some time, if you needed a large central relational store for a business, Oracle was the only answer.
The main change is that MariaDB and PostgreSQL have caught up a lot of ground over the last years, so OracleDB has been losing the edge they have been paid for.
> because you can’t build a business on scamming people in the long run.
When switching is effectively impossible, this is what happens.
Oracle has been buying various application companies with installed bases that are difficult to migrate away from. They are essentially buying customers to milk after putting in their enclosed pasture.
Switching isn't impossible, there are plenty of companies that help you get off Oracle. It's just that it's risky and time consuming, requires specialized knowledge, and companies would rather pay up than deal with all of those things. But this goes for almost any complex product on the planet. Switching costs are high,
Gmail in no shape form or fashion a “market leader” in the enterprise.
Nontech companies are only using spreadsheets, forms, and storage. But they spend their technical manpower on implementing business logic in closed source locked-in expensive software. I don't think its much more work just to implement the business logic in excel/google sheets and serverless functions, and end up with something much much cheaper and much more portable.
> Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
Um... perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines.
If you think there is efficiency gains in terms of cost savings. Why don't you do a startup to try to go after the enterprise software market? We spend millions on ERP, PLM, SCM,WMS, etc. We would gladly move to cheaper solutions that offered the same feature sets. I don't have choice about VMWare because a bunch of software requires on-prem hosting due to latency(need sub 10ms for sensors) and the software is built on top of windows.
> … perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines.
Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that maybe the technology is less of a differentiator in the overall effectiveness of a company’s IT environment than the people running it.
And with IT staffing supply having lagged behind demand (as also evidenced by relatively high salaries in IT vs many other professions), you could easily argue that it was (still is?) historically more difficult to hire good IT people than in many other professions.
And arguably that’s making outsourcing of IT needs relatively more attractive than outsourcing of other business functions where reasonably competent leadership and staffing is easier to come by.
And arguably, capturing many of the benefits of Open Source require more IT competency than using off the shelf mainstream commercial software. If I’m using the same crap that everyone of my competitors is using, none of us win or lose on that. But when using Open Source, I’m more likely to depend on the quality of my IT leadership and staff to outcompete my competitors. And unless a CEO is quite IT literate, s/he probably doesn’t want that additional headache of becoming good at figuring out how to hire good IT leadership.
So I’d hazard a guess, that insourcing and the use of Open Source will become more attractive for many corporations only if/when IT salaries drop more in line with other professions.
Because Linux is fun! /s
Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness, like AWS. This is how I feel about most B2B companies and software. I wonder how a recession and the end of free funny money will change that whole sector?
> Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness
I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up.
I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up.
If these (and the endless examples of paying professionals) are a tax for stupidity and laziness, then everyone is lazy and stupid. If you're not a software company, there's a good chance it's worth it to save the time to pay someone to set it up for you. Also, if Joe's Fish Market wants a POS system and needs a server for it and he decides to set it up himself, if he gets it up and running, what are the chances it'll stay up to day and not have a firewall issue? Probably pretty low compared to if a professional did it.
Joe wants to focus on selling fish. That's where he's a pro. I don't know anything about fish, but I could set up a server for him. We all have our own skills, and it's often worth while to leverage other people's skills, because they'll do it faster, better, and it will likely end up cheaper after time and security are taken into consideration.
> I pay a barber to cut my hair.
Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies:
Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant.
You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you need one.
You pay a barber to cut your hair? Why not just wear a wig!
And so on ...
I mean, people do most of those things (the wig analogy is a bit off but people do get weeves and extensions) — not everyone, but I don’t cook, as an example. I own a frying pan, but I don’t know the last time I’ve ever used it. As a general rule, I don’t cook.
And many, many people don’t own a car, not because they can’t afford one but because it makes more sense to rent one or hire a car service when needed. Frankly, my dream scenario is to have enough money to hire a personal driver who is on-demand and at the ready when I need to go out and do things. For plenty of people, that’s anathema. But for me, I don’t like driving (or cooking) and I’d much rather pay someone to do it for me.
The same is true for software. I like tinkering with a lot of my own software, but if I was building my own business, I sure as shit would rather pay for an established company to handle some of the grunt work, rather than hiring dedicated teams that in aggregate would cost a lot of money.
The rise of SaaS and PaaS isn’t just laziness. It’s a recognition that for a lot of people, even developers, we’d rather entrust a lot of the operations and IT work to someone else.
> The rise of SaaS and PaaS isn’t just laziness.
My point is that none of the analogies are arguments for (or against) SaaS, or in this case "brand name" enterprise software.
Whenever any of these comically banal analogies are brought out to sell something, the intention always seems to be to suspend critical thinking.
There exists many legitimate arguments, for many things. They never begin with "why would anyone need a frying pan".
I lease a car every four years in part so that I don’t have to deal with the inevitable car repairs that come after that point.
For some — but not all — people, that’s a preferable option.
For some — but not all — companies, enterprise tech is a preferable option.
I typically own cars 4-10 years old. I'm currently still happy with a 2008 model that has had exactly one non-maintenance, non-upgrade, cost -- which wouldn't even have prevented using it in any way, I just like the emissions system to be as eco-friendly as it can.
"Inevitable repairs after 4 years" is just a delusion, and silly.
Might I suggest you be honest with yourself and say you like the new car feel? Maybe even like it as a status symbol? Don't want to think about what tires to buy to replace worn-out ones?
I'm the opposite. I like having a scuffed-up car (or in this case, jeep), with dogs climbing all over the seats and sand everywhere from going off road. I'd rather use the thing and have fun on the trip.
Even if I drove my jeep off a cliff, called it a total loss, and got nothing back from insurance, I'd lose less money than you lost in 3 years of leasing -- and I've already had the thing longer than that.
“Might I suggest you be honest with yourself and say you like the new car feel? Maybe even like it as a status symbol? Don't want to think about what tires to buy to replace worn-out ones?”
Dead wrong.
I lease the cheapest car that is practical for my situation. I consider cars completely utilitarian tools. I get no joy from them, I hate driving and take public transit whenever I can.
I had very little money until I was in my late 20s when my career prospects finally took off. Cheap cars that failed frequently were a constant source of anxiety because I couldn’t get far enough ahead to maintain savings. When my career improved and I could afford small luxuries, I spent the money on leasing because I wanted to avoid the anxiety of cars breaking down. It was a gift to myself to lower my stress level.
EDIT: also, in northern Minnesota where the winters are hard and everything is covered in salt, car trouble DOES start after 4 years. Sometimes before.
Wow, you argued with the parent about their own priorities, and then proved their point anyway.
Yes, they don't want to think about what tires to buy. Or whether it needs to be fixed or not. The fact that repairs are not in inevitability but a possibility is part of the point.
The parent is making the point that they're rather throw money at the problem and not have to think about it, not that they've precisely run the numbers on all of the possibilities and decided their outcome is the most cost-effective.
Not thinking about the tires is exactly the point. You said it yourself. What are you arguing for then?
The OP prob doesn’t want to enjoy the car. It’s a car. I don’t care about cars either. I don’t enjoy them as much as use them for their purpose of transportation.
Why would you pay for municipal water supply? Just laziness. Put a well in instead and maintain it.
And when putting in the well, why would you pay someone else to dig it for you? Just laziness. Dig it yourself!
And then when digging the well, why would you rent the drill? Just laziness, outsourcing the maintenance and ownership costs to someone else.
And then why bother buying the drill at some market where they're then manufacturing the drill for you? Pure laziness. Just make the drill yourself!
Or maybe, you just go with a trusted service instead of learning how to manufacture digging equipment when all you really want is running water.
For the first two, there are definitely people how live like that, because of surprise tech companies like Uber making it possible.
Also literally everyone and every company relies on someone else to provide some services or hardware to enable people to do their job and live. Even this conversation could not even happen without other people making sure internet connections are kept stable. This whole "one person is an island" ideology is not something a lot of people subscribe to.
Some companies don't want to spend time doing software things that are not core to their business, so they pay other companies which sometimes do it better. Most definitely not always, but for some companies it would still be better than some in-house hodgepodge.
Actually, I seriously have been thinking about not owning a car ever again. We are the typical two car family. But I went a year without a car and I still go weeks on end without a car when my son needs it.
Uber is actually cheaper for me than a car + insurance + maintenance. I work from home. I’m going to give my car to my son when we move.
When I need to see my parents 200 miles away, I can hop on a small plane for $300 round trip and just work from there for a week.
There are other good replies to you, but one other thing I'll add: for a lot of companies it is much much easier to pay a steady $xxx/month than it is to pay a large amount up front and budget for unknown variable costs down the road.
Would you consider a chef who buys produce from the market as opposed to buying a farm and growing it on their own "stupid and lazy"?
It’s more like being a chef and paying another company to cut up your ingredients for you and cook them.
Companies these days just want to specialize in making cool menu designs and marketing and waiting on the three star Michelin review to roll in somehow.
> It’s more like being a chef and paying another company to cut up your ingredients for you and cook them.
That would be like a Hypervisor company paying VMWare to re-distribute ESXi or something.
But a farm company buying VMWare ESXi to run its IT infra instead of using, say, CentOS is exactly like a chef sourcing ingredients instead of growing them herself.
That is not the same analogy, because a chef's job is to make food, but say a trucking companies job is not to create GPS and mapping software, or some HR tool which tracks sick days etc... The difference is what the core competency of the company is.
Small companies will fail and vanish. Large companies will layoff employees and reinvest in technology to leverage the ones that remain. B2B software companies would do well to retain existing developers and grow their teams if possible to meet scaling demand and cover feature gaps in existing product lines as part of normal business.
One part of the dynamic, simplified: big companies can show quickest cost savings by laying off employees; this satisfies anxious shareholders during the bumpy times by suggesting that management is wiling to make "hard decisions." Such companies cannot quickly re-tool their technology stacks nor renegotiate 3-year software contracts. B2B companies tend to do very well as long as they are not solely focused on their startup/growth/pre-IPO customers, who get hit hard.
Here are some arguments for post-downturn tech growth: 1981 and the use of the PC + Lotus/WordPerfect/BASIC for efficient local compute 1990 and the surge of the LAN to replace centralized IT 2001 and the swell of SaaS 2008 and the swell of cloud 2022 and the .....
If you're right, then this looks like a great opportunity to outcompete these dumb, lazy companies that don't know how to run a business.
I am the 37 year old CTO and co-founder of a company that pays VMWare something like that per year because we need an endpoint management solution. We have a strong engineering team but that certainly isn’t something we are going to build ourselves. VMWare is not just virtualization.
I'm in a senior position but not CEO. I'd pay VMware for virtualization as it just works compared to the complexity of opensource solutions. For endpoint mgmt, I'm curious about your use case? Is it about managing virtual endpoints in the cloud, on-prem servers (physical or virtual) or are you talking about laptops/workstations?
VMware purchased Airwatch, perhaps the premiere mobile device management suite.
Laptops and workstations. We use Workspace ONE.
Grove.co is a great example because it is totally not a software company. Is your role as CTO primarily the ERP & storefront, or just one or the other? I'm not following what you mean by endpoint (other than "storefront" because ERP would all be a SaaS right?)
Storefront. We have our own headless e-commerce platform, with iOS, Android, and Web clients. We also have our own order management system that mediates between storefront and our ERP (which is commercial SaaS). And a handful of other smaller applications for everything from outbound carrier rate card testing, to customer service tooling & automation (integrated with ZenDesk) and all sorts of other bits and bobs like ETL code, integration layers, marketing tools, etc, etc. We should not have quite this much custom software, but it takes time to migrate the non-strategic sub-systems to commercial solutions — and even then you’d be surprised how much custom software we DO actually need in a business like this.
My role also encompasses many “CIO-like” functions, but my area of expertise is in application development and I look to hire strong leaders in the other areas (or move certain tech domains entirely into other functions — eg our warehouse management system lives within our operations group, and me and my team help in an advisory capacity but don’t “own” the budget or WMS strategy).
What deems the ERP necessary that you can't do custom?
endpoint being employee devices, probably (via vmware's workspace one product)
It may be my pure naivety about management software, but I assume it just consists of spreadsheets, forms, secure login, data storage, and simple queries. I cannot imagine anything with this combination that couldn't be implemented in Google Sheets (and workspaces, and a handful of other google cloud apis) for at most $20 a month per user.
whats an „endpoint management solution“
Compliance based stuff... "do you trust this machine to access your network/services/applications and execute these commands?"
https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/endpoint-secur...
(the VMWare owned product isn't CrowdStrike, that just had the best SEO page with a clear description. VMWare have Carbon Black which is the other dominant player in this market https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/whats-new/carbon-black.ht... )
That's really interesting. So a company would hire Crowdstrike/VMWare, and say "here's all these endpoints, make sure they are secure"? And then CS/VM would provide the service to manage the assets and their connectivity? Ka-ching. I would not want to spin up an IT team to do all of this if I could hire some experts with concentrated knowledge.
Hit the nail on the head. It's a bit more than that realistically.
I work for CrowdStrike just so any potential bias is out there in the open, but do not speak for them.
Hope you started working there years ago and got that sweet stock gains
They are almost certainly talking about Airwatch, which is a mobile device management solution (allows an employer to set restrictions on BYoD endpoints.) It might be a reference to Carbon Black, which is kind of like an antivirus client with some forensics capabilities added in.
Access control/management for corporate networks and networked resources.
usually cell and mobile device but can also include computers. Being able to push out software, policy updates, provisioning and remote wiping of devices.
We did the math at my previous employer. The cost of running OpenStack, in terms of training and day to day operations was higher than just paying VMware their licens fee. We even had a guy from RedHat help us do the cost analysis, didn't matter, cheaper to just pay VMware. This didn't even include the cost of doing the migration.
I can't imagine it being cheaper to build everything yourself on top of just plain KVM, or even LXC.
Working in a Data Center, we provide various services, including Dedicated Cloud and Shared Cloud. We also evaluated OpenStack years ago... yes, we came to the same conclusion and just use VMWare.
Also factor in the people trained to use VMware. There is always a pool of individuals to hire.
> "To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly"
You can see people spending millions of dollars a year to keep from having to deal with Linux as evidence that they are stupid. Or you can see it as evidence that Linux really is that bad. It works both ways.
VMware gives you a thing people can be trained on and certified on, a brand you can hire for and screen resumes on, a consistent environment which behaves in a predictable way that you really can turn employees into replacable cogs. Any helpdesk or admin employee can deal with VMware, any MSP, any tech recruiter, and a lot of training companies. You can get backup systems which "support VMware" and storage which integrates with VMware snapshots, and reporting tools which work with VMware.
It's almost not about the tech at all, it's about how do you build companies on shifting sands? You define interfaces for components which can be plugged together. "VMware" is an API or interface that the business can work to; vendors can say "deploy this OVF to VMware", sales can say to the business "this thing we need works with VMware" or to the customers "we can work with your VMware" or "our offering is trustworthy because we use VMware" and the customer recognises the name. HR can say "we need to hire people who know VMware" and that means something fairly specific to the wider world. "runs on Linux" and "people who know Linux" are wildly, wildly, variable and vague things which could mean "ran a website, minimum wage" or "turns SELinux off to make things run" or "was SRE for FAANG" or "did a PHD in AI for tuning networking stacks in HPC applications but doesn't know anything else".
You make software by defining interfaces and components that can be plugged together to make larger systems. Brands are that, for tech. Like you hire someone who "knows React" not someone who "is a programmer" because that's too vague and is as likely to get you someone who worked on a Java CRUD program or someone who worked on a Python log analyser. Like you hire a "service delivery manager" or a "customer account manager" and not "an employee".
It's a big plus in the corporate world to be able to outsource support. It's worth it for companies to pay VMWare, Microsoft, etc. larges sums of money for support contracts so they have someone to call when things break. While Microsoft sells Windows Server, they also try really hard to add on support contracts with it. Paying several thousand dollars a year for a support contract is probably cheaper than paying salary+benefits for someone within the company to maintain it, and you get the façade of talking directly to people who know the product inside and out
Sometimes for me it seems like they pay to "get the façade of talking directly to people in suits" rather than having to deal with technies.
> it seems like they pay to "get the façade of talking directly to people in suits" rather than having to deal with technies
Broadly speaking, anyone generalising the world into suits and techies needs a translation layer between them and anyone else.
There is a whole world outside of silicon valley, crypto, and HN startups. There are huge companies that don't care a fart about open source, the newest buzzwords, or it's go/rust/java or c++. They want something they can get a full solutions from and that is companies like vmware, oracle, IBM, Dell. They want support from those corps when things fail and it's costing them millions of dollars per hour when the system breaks.
Throwing money at a problem is an easy thing to do, if you’ve got the money. Lock-in sucks, but having someone to blame doesn’t.
A friend uses VMWare in an IT role at a medium sized company. They don’t have a software engineering team, just a bunch of users and an IT skeleton crew; so it makes sense for them.
As someone who works in the MSP space, Enterprise basically runs this country from a business perspective. I'm not even kidding.
Microsoft has a monopoly on Corporate Domains/OS as it is.
Whether or not those specific companies are good deals absent legacy requirements, how many engineers can you hire for that $100K+ to DIY? And how are you going to convince your auditors that you're taking appropriate steps to mitigate your risk? Companies broadly need to make build vs. buy decisions about a lot of things and they should generally be pretty selective about what they build.
Presuming for a moment that you’re under 40 for the sake of conversation:
Have you ever considered the other way around? That is, “What changes with age that would make someone over 40 prefer outsourcing a problem to an enterprise?”
It’s possible that this trend is a result of a different perspective.
Certainly part of it is that, as you have been around longer and maybe moved higher up, you probably better appreciate how expensive it really is to have "just" a small team doing something that could largely be outsourced. You have the developers of course, their benefits, their manager's salary and benefits and some small slice of attention up the management chain and across other functional groups like HR. And it's just one more distraction from the things that actually matter to running the business.
Everything in this conversation is dancing around the same thing: core competency.
Something I saw in action building a startup is that the fewer people you have on your team, the more efficient they are.
As you grow, it’s wise to focus your headcount on your core competency and outsource everything else so that you are committing the organizational expense of more employees to all and only what you need as a business.
Of course, enterprise stuff is not all roses. You still have to have someone with product expertise. There’s vendor lock-in. Enterprise software is often oversold. Etc etc.
There is no panacea, just stuff that works better in different situations.
I work for a regular corp. We have a lot of servers, our annual hardware bill is 8 figures (just for our single project), more than our developer's wages. 100k is a drop.
One thing you are paying for is maturity (in both software and the engineers) and predictable behavior. When you need to run a business sometimes (almost all the time) it's easier to pay people to get out of your way so you can execute. Execution is everything in running a successful and profitable business. Don't be penny foolish.
You should always outsource any part of your business that is not part of your core competency and doesn’t give you a competitive advantage - ie “the undifferentiated heavy lifting”.
I worked at companies as a software developer from 1996 - 2012 that had to manage their own infrastructure. But today, the only company that I worked for back then that would be managing their own infrastructure today is the one that has mainframes and hardware that handle the backends for lottery systems across the US.
By 2012, there was a slow shift to the cloud.
I first was exposed to how large enterprises worked in 2017. I was hired to lead two green field implementations. But at the last minute they decided to “move to the cloud” neither they nor I knew anything about the cloud. They hired consultants and a Managed Service Provider. Of course the internal IT department was vigilantly defending their turf and the “consultants” were old school Netops folks who only knew how to “lift and shift” and duplicate an on prem infrastructure and all of the red tape to the cloud and of course it was more expensive than just using a colo.
I spent the next six months after the decision was made studying AWS and getting a certification not because I value certifications (I don’t). But it gave me a guided learning path to know what I didn’t know. It did open my eyes to what I wanted to do - work with companies - specifically developers and operations to show them how to actually take advantage of cloud and not just do lift and shifts - ie true “Devops”.
I left that company and went to a small startup for two years where I learned everything I know about “cloud application modernization” and then ended up in Professional Services at AWS.
Until I started working with large enterprises and government organizations from the consulting side, I never appreciated the concerns of large enterprises and how they aren’t in the “tech” business and it does make sense to outsource that knowledge - not to ProServe we don’t do that type of work - to external partners.
As far as VMWare, as silly as it sounds on the surface. Companies actually use VMWare to manage hybrid infrastructure on the cloud and on prem as a “single pane of glass”.
https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/
I personally don’t deal with those implementations. I stick with app dev.
Newer companies don't deal with Linux directly either. The vast majority use managed cloud services (kubernetes, containers, serverless, managed databases, etc.). For all practical purposes - most of the start-up players use "enterprise software" as well. It's just different enterprises.
> To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly
New companies, too. There's a lot to be said for paying someone to make problems go away. Not everyone wants to write their own software or change their own oil.
Really? I work for a manufacturing company. We lose about $50k/hr if systems are down. Paying for vendor support is a fucking no brainer.
"Use proxmox" - fucking lol
Hire one person less and you've already broken even. Applies just the same to to any managed service on the cloud, to Outlook365 instead of your own email server, etc.
And when you outsource it - you make finding that next one person someone else’s problem. I’ve had to hire that “one person” before. It’s a pain. And while we were looking for that one person, I had to juggle my day job (software development) with net ops.
Yes I know how to do app dev + cloud Net ops, it’s kind of my thing.
Legacy. Interoperability with other similar companies. Manpower requirements (far easier to onboard a junior developer with boring technologies)
The fat bosses above me get more cred by buying something expensive and ha ing everything outsourced, than doing something brilliant and inventing the future. This is the reason for it. I'm this way the fat bosses are left alone and can go home to their families, go on holidays, cabins and whatnot with not a gram of risk and uncertainty.
Yeah, a lot of companies which are raising world's consciousness wouldn't buy the grubby enterprise software.
Can we like... stop building these ginormous conglomerates? Thanks.
If intellectual property (specifically software patents) were weakened, this would be less of a problem, right?
Companies don't buy companies, they buy IP, as I understand it.
Maaaaaybe. I am not a fan of software patents but intellectual property laws are the only thing stopping Big Company A from just cloning Small Company B's product. At least now they have to go to the trouble of buying them.
Of course, it goes both ways and laws often favor the strong against the weak. But it is not all one-sided.
> intellectual property laws are the only thing stopping Big Company A from just cloning Small Company B's product
Is that really the case? Does it work? Isn't Instagram basically cloning TIkTok right now? and cloned Snap before that?
Apple with Alfred, Spotlight, F.lux etc are also examples. Seems like for software, either patents aren't utilized or simply can't be enforced.
Instragram/TikTok/Snap aren't exactly novel ideas, the only valuable thing about them are the brands (also intellectual property but not what we are talking about).
I only know VMWare from its days as virtualization software. I would put money on them having had a bunch of patents on the specific techniques they used.
Software patents sometimes work out, sometimes not. If I were king of the world I wouldn't get rid of them but narrow the scope down to protecting specific implementations, none of this "Buying stuff of the internet" pantenting that invested the 00s.
> Big Company A from just cloning Small Company B's product
That's called competition
Wasn't there a whole thing about big tech companies interviewing small companies as if to acquire them and then just cloning the product anyways?
Most small companies don't have patents, or ones that matter.
No, not in the software industry. Nothing VMware has in pure IP is that special. I can’t think of any of the big tech companies that even use VMware.
Broadcom is paying for the huge enterprise customer base, sales and support connections, mindshare, and engineering org that has proven adaptable to market demands.
> I can’t think of any of the big tech companies that even use VMware.
I would be shocked if every single 'big' tech company didn't use _some_ vmware product _somewhere_ internally. Their software portfolio is a hell of a lot bigger than just the actual vmware product. Example: where I work we use the vmware product Carbon Black for 'endpoint protection', which as I understand it is virus scanning + some amount of port monitoring.
Such a silicon valley HN comment holy shit.
Calm down. I’m talking about Google and Amazon in the hypervisor space (which is about the only interesting IP VMware has). Everything VMware makes can generally be done better in-house by tech companies. VMware’s business proposition is managing all of that cruft when it’s not an area of relevance to your business.
It’s like saying Taco Bell has incredible culinary secrets because it’s so widespread.
> I can’t think of any of the big tech companies that even use VMware.
You are quite wrong…
Uh, except everyone that uses VMWare, which is a massive list.
You don't have to think, you can just browse their list, filter by industry, and have fun as you will:
Note that this is just a tiny subset of companies that use VMWare (those that have writeups). I've worked for some very big companies that used it but aren't listed.
Out of the five Big Tech companies (FAANG - Netflix + MS), three have their own cloud divisions and one (Apple) does partially use AWS and Azure.
Consolidation in mature markets inevitably happens.
...absent functioning antitrust legislation, yes.
Is there an antitrust case to be made here? Antitrust means a lot more than just 'big company'.
You seem to be asking if there is a case within current legislation. Whereas the parent is suggesting that more cases ought to be covered by future stricter legislation (which could at least in principle be as simple as "big company").
So you put a cap in it, what happens, mitosis?
I’m not sure it would have that big of an effect. It would certainly help in some areas like search and social networks though.
We can but asia won’t. We can stop and let Asian tech giants eat us alive.
You're saying "Asia" but you're really referring to China.
There is no reason for the west to allow Chinese companies to compete in their markets. Reciprocal market access or no access at all.
If western trade agreements forbid companies of a certain size from selling locally there is no alternative for Asian companies but to split or exit the market. We aren't helpless passengers on a worldwide economic joyride.
A lot of America's wealth comes from being competitive on a global scale. Google is popular not only in the U.S., but also in Europe and the rest of the Americas. Apple sells phones, computers, and service all over the world. People use these products because they're best-in-class. We may be able to protect the domestic market, but the international market will not be as forgiving.
Samsung, Toyota, Sony, TSMC?
I may have missed something but hasn't China recently demonstrated that it absolutely is not willing to let its tech giants get too big and powerful. Take a look at what has happened with BABA.
China doesn't care about the size of companies. Alibaba ran into political problems because they wanted to compete in an industry with established players with strong relations to regional governments and different parts of the CCP.
really bizarre that you blame Asians when tech giants exist in other regions. Really didn't expect to see this dog whistling on HN.
Also are you talking about Israel or Bangladesh? They are in Asia too.
>really bizarre that you blame Asians when tech giants exist in other regions.
it's not bizarre in the least if you consider any of the metrics that attempt to quantify corporate size and holdings.
Here's a market cap index[0], do you notice anything?
One thing that I notice is that every company in the top 25 is either American (.. or by some legal stretches, Irish) or from somewhere in Asia.
>Really didn't expect to see this dog whistling on HN.
"We can stop and let Asian tech giants eat us alive." is neither coded, nor suggestive -- nor is it written in such a way as to avoid condemnation or blame, It's a plain statement.
Can you describe how it's a dog whistle, and to signal which faction? I don't get it.
Asia is too vast for a group of people to be against the entirety, no? At least I haven't ran into the anti-Asia faction, yet; but I have ran into plenty of anti-country folks.
[0]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...
competition requires consolidation in order to acquire new lines of profit, it’s inevitable
> competition requires consolidation in order to acquire new lines of profit, it’s inevitable
It may be inevitable but I think I have a solid idea to at least check its explosive growth.
The CEO and the board (includes President) ought to be personally civil as well as criminally liable for any actions of the employees, contractors, or agents of the company if they cannot prove that the employees, contractors, or agents acted against company policy. Elimination of the "right to work" is a precondition to this proposal.
Sure right after we dismember NATO. Oh wait…
EDIT: NATO shills don't like this comment!
Would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot lately, unfortunately, and we ban that sort of account.
If they invested instead a mere Billion into optimizing a fork of e.g. QEMU they would destroy VMware in performance.
This isn’t about the hypervisor. This is about the enterprise sales. A bank isn’t going to run their data center on qemu, regardless of the performance. They are going to go with the company that can sell them support contracts with dedicated engineers to answer the phone.
Big companies are starting to learn that free open source can be supported in house, in some cases it is even cheaper, but in others the flexibility of being in control of when a much needed by only you feature is developed is a big deal. Open source also is never acquired and the price jacked up to beyond the worth but they are forced to pay the price anyway because they can't get off before their license expires.
> Big companies are starting to learn that free open source can be supported in house
Sure but the problem here is can you find and retain the people who can do that work, if you are a big lumbering "un-interesting" company where tech is not your core focus? In most cases the answer is "no".
There's a reason major software vendors provide professional services. If their customers could reliably hire and (most importantly) retain experts on their own, they wouldn't need professional services.
>There's a reason major software vendors provide professional services. If their customers could reliably hire and (most importantly) retain experts on their own, they wouldn't need professional services.
This. As a tech person with decades of professional services experience in the tech space, I couldn't agree more.
Generally, there are three reasons why corporate entities hire professional services (this isn't limited to tech stuff either):
1. There's a specific need for design/implementation expertise where FTEs are either not readily available or are unnecessary once the implementation is complete;
2. The internal group in favor of a particular technology/implementation wants/needs validation from "experts" to get full buy-in from management;
3. Professional services are brought in to "validate" existing project plans/implementation details as a CYA against project failure (e.g., "the consultants told us this was the way to go. They were wrong, not us.") which (both bringing in consultants and project failure) happens a lot more often than you might think.
Those are all valid points. However those are also the counter argument: eventually the cost of all those services is more than the cost to do it in house, or find a competitor.
Yeah but again, it's most often not about the money...
I work for a large enterprise and we pay or retain vendors to do things for us all the time, at a much higher cost than it would be to do it in house, because we cannot find/hire/retain the expertise to do it ourselves, and at some point we need to get the work done so that other more mission-critical work can happen to drive the business forward.
Plus, there is value in paying someone to make the find/hire/retain part their problem instead of ours.
We buy the reliability of getting the work done in a timely manner, on top of the work itself.
I work for a small company and they seem to have figured this out 20 years ago. I've been tasked with supporting the network and I've got to say that all the fancy (or not) proprietary firewalls all seem like a pick your own poison of cost/support issues, and they all go end of life eventually but the network needs to keep running. We also use PFSense in a few places and I think the feeling among the operations team (2.5 of us) is that we'd like to just use that in future.
I use PFSense and Snort at home and it's perfectly fine for the price I paid for it, but enterprise grade it ain't. I wouldn't use it to protect a network worth more than my beer budget.
I don't know what business you're in and maybe after a nightly tape backup there's nothing important for you to lose. Frankly that's most small businesses. But if you've got real trade secrets get a proper IDS/IPS before you regret it.
Sure, the networking thing is a part time job for all of us, and there's even been some talk of bringing in professional services to look over it a bit. But my question is, what would we get? The whole IDS/IPS/WAF industry seems pretty much dripping in snakeoil. It seems like Cisco was once the king, but has lost a lot of respect. Palo Alto seems to be the current fashion but unless you have a serious alcohol problem, it's going to exceed your beer budget. I worked with Imperva and Alert Logic back in the day and no one ever seemed too impressed with them. Then there's SonicWall which seems reviled and Fortigate which seems like the reasonable budget option. I'm sure there's tons others I'm not even aware of.
VMware :)
> They are going to go with the company that can sell them support contracts with dedicated engineers to answer the phone.
There's no reason the company selling them support couldn't be providing support for QEMU btw. If it met their needs otherwise I'm sure they'd consider it.
Yup as a former employee I can confirm this is not about the hypervisor although vmw has a good hypervisor, it’s about everything auxiliary to that
At the cost of giving away their billion dollars of R&D to their competition - QEMU is GPL licensed.
It works both ways —- they get their competitors’ R&D too.
Plenty of companies seem to be OK with using GPL2-licensed Linux, why wouldn’t qemu be the same?
right but they wouldn't be able to own qemu. that's what they want
It's not merely about the performance, it's about the management layer on top, support contracts, enterprise sales etc.
I didn't know VMware was still a thing. What do they even do? Who uses any of it?
VMware has the largest on-premises hypervisor footprint by a large margin and sells a zillion other software products to layer on top. Pretty much every large public company has a VMware footprint in their data center, and frequently have their entire on-prem infrastructure built on top of vSphere.
Fair enough. I could have googled it. I live in a bubble of Linux and AWS/other cloud services, so this sort of thing isn't part of my world.
You can get three Dell servers and a VMware install ISO and have a hypervisor with a web interface, a distributed cluster filesystem replicating between the nodes, VM failover in case of hardware failure, live migration of VMs between nodes for maintenance (state and/or storage), a centralised update system, VLAN aware guest networking, isolated management networking, all up and running in production in half a day - less if you someone has already opened the boxes and racked it all up before hand. Without any great technical skills needed to setup any of it.
With a bit more planning and a larger environment and more licensing, and not much more tech skills, you'll have redundant trunked network links, it will migrate VMs between nodes to balance load, integrate with the node IPMI management to power hosts down when the load is light and power them on when the load increases, and for enough money on licensing it will keep two VMs on different host nodes in sync down to the CPU instruction in case one host fails nobody will notice. Also with not much tech skills.
And when I say "not much tech skills" you do need to understand enough about computing to plan it and cable things in properly and deal with VLANs and subnets and ISOs and DNS, routing, and VMware's way of doing networking, and the basics. But you need to know approximately nothing about /etc/ or XML or YAML, cluster quorums, elections, filesystem locking, heartbeat or watchdog services, distributed consensus protocols, package management, LVM, systemd, hypervisor subsystems, PAM modules, Kerberos, webservers, databases, Unix permissions, or etc.
I'm under no illusions that it's cheap, or bug-free, or that you never need to SSH in and poke it ever, or that it's the right thing for every task, or that it's the modern way. But it's an amazing packaging up of a lot of things into a worldbeating product, and its integration with Dell specifically - Dell hosts, Dell EMC storage - is such a good fit that makes me surprised and sad that Dell would sell VMware.