Broadcom's Answer To VMware Pricing Outrage: You're Using It Wrong (theregister.com) 42
A senior Broadcom executive has defended VMware's controversial licensing changes by arguing that customers complaining about costs simply weren't using the software bundles properly. VMware shifted away from selling perpetual licenses for individual products to subscription bundles after Broadcom's acquisition. Some smaller and mid-sized customers claim their costs increased eight to 15 times under the new pricing structure, prompting migration plans to alternative platforms.
Joe Baguley, Broadcom's chief technology officer for EMEA, countered that 87% of VMware's top 10,000 customers have signed up for VMware Cloud Foundation, and that cost complaints "don't play out" when Broadcom sits down with customers directly.
Joe Baguley, Broadcom's chief technology officer for EMEA, countered that 87% of VMware's top 10,000 customers have signed up for VMware Cloud Foundation, and that cost complaints "don't play out" when Broadcom sits down with customers directly.
Facts matter (Score:5, Insightful)
And you weren't the customer they wanted (Score:3)
I really hate that in some ways that I agree with Broadcom on some of this, because they're still a bunch of bastards for how they handled the vmware acquisition, even when they did the right thing. The whole point of the essentials three pack was to give you enough of a taste of the vmware experience that you'll be encouraged to stick with it as your grow. The problem is that the sort of environments that went with that bundle rarely ever grew to need anything larger and many of them never renewed maintena
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The whole point of the essentials three pack was to give you enough of a taste of the vmware experience that you'll be encouraged to stick with it as your grow.
Was it? I thought the whole point was "how do we extract revenue from customers too small and price sensitive to buy vSphere standard?" Anyone who just wanted "a taste of the experience" could run the free ESXi.
The problem is that the sort of environments that went with that bundle rarely ever grew to need anything larger and many of them never renewed maintenance.
OK, I'll bite: why is that a "problem?"
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The whole point was to have pretty charts and graphs and reports you could show management.
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IMHO, I could name a number of companies that could have had a better future for VMWare. Especially after what Broadcom did to Symantec. Microsoft (although it might run afoul of anti-trust), IBM (similar), Apple (if they wanted to branch out into something constantly profitable, similar to what they do with Claris), Meta, Google, HPe, etc.
Yes, prices would increase, but it wouldn't have nose-dived into the ground. If some company is smart, they could easily do some seeding and get companies to move from
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Re: Facts matter (Score:2)
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"Small businesses don't have RTO or RPO requirements. High uptime is an enterprise feature."
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That was the whole point of essentials bundle, for about 50k you could have a 2 node cluster with an active/backup san and have enterprise uptime on a small business budget. We did these every single day.
Combine that with needing licensed versions of ESXi to take snapshot and thus do backups efficiently and you had a very easy to maintain system and it was relatively cheap.
I have plenty of customers that have RTO/RPO measured in seconds that are quite a bit smaller than you'd think. I just wish Zerto woul
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"they were going to bump me up one tier of features that I didn't need, and charge 5 grand per year but in 3-year lots"
"You were using the bundles incorrectly! The essentials edition was only meant for proof of concept for small businesses, not once you were using the product for realsies. Your company was not getting the true value out of it, because you were buying the wrong edition and not enough units of our product all along."
AKA: (Score:2)
"Oh those pesky, stupid customers..."
Greed (Score:3, Interesting)
Broadcom appears to have the attitude that if you are not stuffing at least a million dollars a year in their pockets they want nothing to do with you. I used to deploy new VMWare instances almost weekly- now I migrate folks to other products from VMWare.
Re:Greed (Score:4, Funny)
Broadcom appears to have the attitude that if you are not stuffing at least a million dollars a year in their pockets they want nothing to do with you.
In fairness, I have that same attitude. It just doesn't work out for me because I don't have the leverage.
migration project (Score:4, Informative)
I have been working for a year and a half on a hardware migration project that should have been super-easy: replace 5 ESXI hosts with newer faster servers, replace 1 SAN device + fiber switches, and replace aging switches, routers, and firewalls. My client, looking at a $30,000 VMware bill, said screw it and now they're moving to HyperV drastically increasing the time to complete what would have been a simple upgrade. Greed is mostly what's hurting the VMware platform.
"Simply" (Score:5, Insightful)
about costs simply weren't using the software bundles properly.
(emphasis mine) In other words: the pricing was changed to something that was ripping the customers off by default, and the pricing schemes are too complicated to be able to select the correct one. But the customer is to blame!
Agreed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
>"Joe Baguley, Broadcom's chief technology officer for EMEA, countered that 87% of VMware's top 10,000 customers have signed up for VMware Cloud Foundation, and that cost complaints "don't play out" when Broadcom sits down with customers directly."
My translation of that: if you are a huge-enough company and manage to arrange a meeting with Broadcom, you might be able to get terms that are only marginally-hiked instead of hugely-hiked. For now.
My recommendation is, if possible, look at XCP-NG/Xen Orchestra.
https://xcp-ng.org/ [xcp-ng.org]
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/1... [xcp-ng.org]
https://docs.xcp-ng.org/instal... [xcp-ng.org]
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Reading into the article and his choice of words, sure some get some negotiated break, but the key is his use of the phrase:
complaints "don't play out"
What he means is that the customers complain, but the complaints are invalid because the customer isn't using as much of the feature set as they *could*, and so the complaint has no merit because they are getting what they paid for even if it's useless to them.
He then goes to either fabricate or cherry pick a few examples of what a customer might say when the
They will panic... (Score:2)
Re:They will panic... (Score:4, Insightful)
You completely misunderstand the business model that Broadcom has chosen to use here. For a primer, see the "Fuck you, pay me" scene from Goodfellas.
They are purposefully imploding their customer base. The goal is to squeeze every customer that cannot move off of vSphere like a lemon in a hydraulic press. They actually do not give a fuck if you migrate to another platform, because they'd rather have 10x the revenue from their captive big fish than worry about the small fish or the ones that got away.
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You completely misunderstand the business model that Broadcom has chosen to use here. For a primer, see the "Fuck you, pay me" scene from Goodfellas.
They are purposefully imploding their customer base. The goal is to squeeze every customer that cannot move off of vSphere like a lemon in a hydraulic press. They actually do not give a fuck if you migrate to another platform, because they'd rather have 10x the revenue from their captive big fish than worry about the small fish or the ones that got away.
The problem is that there's no such thing as a captive big fish. The biggest companies might be captive in the short term, but they also can throw money at the problem and make it a short-term problem. The bigger the dollar amount, the more they'll be willing to spend to move away from an extortionate vendor. There's really nothing that they do that other companies can't do.
Also, the whole point of VMWare is to save money off of buying the hardware. If the price gets high enough that it's cheaper to jus
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Also, the whole point of VMWare is to save money off of buying the hardware. If the price gets high enough that it's cheaper to just buy the hardware, what's the point of using it at all?
Well, actually hardware consolidation is a use case, sure, but I think nowadays it's more about redundancy, fault tolerance, rapid deployment/decomissioning. If you are doing it right, your "OS" boot volumes should be considered disposable, but a lot of shops do it wrong and want the OS volumes to be hosted in centralized storage, which is much easier with a virtual machine approach (yes you can SAN/iSCSI boot, but it's not very appealing).
Of course your first point stands, that VMWare has competition with
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They are purposefully imploding their customer base. The goal is to squeeze every customer that cannot move off of vSphere like a lemon in a hydraulic press. They actually do not give a fuck if you migrate to another platform, because they'd rather have 10x the revenue from their captive big fish than worry about the small fish or the ones that got away.
The problem with that plan is that collectively, those companies have a lot of resources to develop other solutions. It's only a matter of time before they form an industry group that duplicates VMWare with open-source tools, that's just as easy to use. Someone will also sell support for it. At that point, VMWare as a platform is done.
I suppose it's possible that Broadcom sees that happening anyway, and is just trying to squeeze as much out of it as possible before then.
More specifically (Score:2)
The truth is, most SMB customers don't use a lot of the features in VMWare's ecosystem. Many are only really useful once a customer gets to a certain scale. As a result, most customers didn't want to pay for those extra features, but if VMWare wanted to support them they needed to bundle them in to the price of the base Hypervisor licensing. The result: only really one or two big "everything" licenses that include a bunch of features that smaller organizations don't need.
I'm not defending Broadcom. IMO
greedy fucking liars!! (Score:5, Interesting)
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$900 per year is really, really, realllllyyyy small potatoes. All due respect, but nowadays, 900 bucks is basically a few trips to the grocery store. 900 bucks probably amounts to roughly 10 hours of a single employee's time.
Broadc
Re:greedy fucking liars!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has managed to not make this mistake with office, though they've flirted with it. Sometimes you need lots of small fish to lure the big fish.
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If you're a small customer, VMware is no longer an option, in the same way that IBM only pays attention to the needs of bil
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Of course, the nice meaty IBM locked in ecosystem is far stickier than VMWare.
That replacement for a mainframe, can it run exactly the same software? Generally not, it has to be ported, and porting is risk.
For VMWare, the replacements can run the same exact applications (the processor architecture and software stack have nothing to do with vmware's part of the solution). A customer may be *somewhat* stickier as they bought into vmware-centric solutions with partners, but as they migrate to newer hardware
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The problem with this attitude is that if you wish to only cater to the large fish, you reduce the total ecosystem of that software, and risk losing the "but everyone uses X" ideal. Other companies will then step in, and present an alternative. If enough people use the alternatives, a new primary ecosystem may develop, and suddenly you're not it.
It's way worse than that.
I don't think that works anymore (Score:2)
So the way it plays out is right now if you're a large Enterprise VMware has you by the balls. As others have pointed out there really isn't anything that can scale the way VMware does and broadcom knows that which is why they're charging through the nose.
Smaller shops can and will switch to other products but like the grandparents is implying VMware doesn't care because when you can soak your bi
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Well clearly you just need to start using 31.1k/year of the additional value you will be getting /s
Awfully convenient (Score:2)
If you just want the basic vsphere-managing-a-few-ESXi-hosts setup the bundle is stupidly expensive; but if you try to justify the cost of the bundle by using other parts of it you end up with a system that is significantly harder to migrate away when Broadcom decides to alter the deal further.
Bargain bin (Score:2)
Broadcom execs may shudder at the very thought of this. I remember once picking up a copy of VMWare from a computer retailer's bargain bin. It was under $10. This was almost 25 years ago.
not changing minds (Score:2)
There are lots of IT decision makers here on slashdot. Is there anyone here that is planning a new vmware deployment, now or in the future?
Seems the plan is to abuse the customers that are left, the ones that can't/won't migrate to something else.
worse (Score:2)
Using it wrong (Score:2)
If you mean by using it at all, then yes, you're using it wrong.
"You're fucking your customers wrong." (Score:1)
> You're using it wrong.
No, you're just fucking your customers wrong, Broadcom. That's why this: ...
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
https://www.ciodive.com/news/b... [ciodive.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/vmwar... [reddit.com]
https://arstechnica.com/civis/... [arstechnica.com]
and so on.
Who's doing what wrong now? Greedy pigfuckers at Broadcom or IT professionals everywhere in the world.
Go on, I'm listening.