VMware Employees, Customers, and Partners What's Next after Broadcom?
Transcript
>> Hey, Keith Townsend, principal of The CTO Advisor. If you are a VMware employee, customer, partner, how should you be, no, not how should you be feeling, how do you react to your feelings about the acquisition announcement of VMware being acquired by Broadcom? You know what, let's take each one individual, grab a cup of coffee, it's going to be a little bit longer "CTO Dose" than normal. If you're a VMware employee, it's shocking news. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to sugar coat it.
If you're in a HR, accounting, some support role, chances are, your role is going to be redundant, it's going to get riffed. And you've been through this in VMware in the past, so nothing new there in that sense. But if you're in the engineering portion of it, chances are, you know, you're going to get a smooth transition over to a job offer at Broadcom, or whoever purchases VMware. First off, that's going to be at least a year out. It's not going to happen anytime soon, there's going to be the 40 day go shop period.
And then there's the wait of just them getting regulatory approval and everything going through, and funding, et cetera. That's a lot of time, that's a lot of time to just sit back and think about the opportunity, is Broadcom's business aligned to what you want to do? Regardless of what Broadcom decides, the three different areas that I'm talking about, customer, employee and partner, all have the same thing in common, you're trying to solve the same problem VMware wasn't able to solve as an independent company, how do you do hybrid infrastructure?
How do you combine VMware's core product, VMware vSphere, to Cloud Native technologies, or Public Cloud technologies, in a way that alleviates the burden of operations? That is a problem that VMware was not able to solve as an independent company, but I'm sure you have ideas about how that can be solved, and that skill and that talent can be used at a lot of places. Google Cloud, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Amazon Web Services, different culture than VMware? Yes, but absolutely places that are trying to solve these problems and need your skillset to solve it.
And then there's the simple fact that VMware is being purchased by Broadcom because of VMware vSphere, because of the expertise you brought to the table. So take a deep breath, it's going to be okay. You're extremely skilled, you're extremely valuable, and you'll land, well, I know Ragu said it during the town hall, and people were kind of... It's true, you're a high-skilled resource and your skills are needed, if not in VMware, elsewhere. Customers, you know what? I've had the wide range of reactions as I think about the VMware customer.
Broadcom had us hostage a little bit, right? VMware vSphere is kind of the solution for doing virtualization at scale. That doesn't change. It's why they bought VMware, it's why they're confident that VMware customers are going to stick around, it's quite frankly why I'm confident VMware customers are going to stick around. If I'm a VMware customer right now, I'm thinking about my ELA, and whether or not I can get perpetual licenses, and lock in some cost savings before the acquisition of Broadcom.
But am I thinking about switching? Probably not. I mean, the drivers really haven't changed. I'm not going with KVM. I'm not going with Hyper-V. Those were options before the acquisition, they weren't desirable before then. The price increase from Broadcom is going to be well thought out. There's going to be a price increase, but that price increase is going to be such that it's going to be painful, but not painful enough that I want to go through the switching cost of going through another solution.
So, you know what, chess move, kudos to Broadcom for doing, I think kind of the obvious. But let's talk about the ancillary products around VMware vSphere. There's the EUC Workspace ONE, which has been having a rough go at it in the news lately with some vulnerabilities. If you're not happy with Workspace ONE and Horizon and all that now, that's not going to change during the acquisition. It's long in the tooth. VMware hasn't really, Brian Madden went through this with some excruciating detail, VMware isn't going to start all of a sudden investing in EUC again, it is already in maintenance mode, if you ask me.
VMware, vSAN, in a sense, I think those are core to the vSphere proposition, so those products will be fine. Carbon Black and security, that's a little bit different. Symantec and Carbon Black have some overlap, and there'll have to be some rationalization. But again, we're looking like a year to 18 months down the road. And if I had to weigh the things that I have going, the Cloud Native things that I've, doing in my data center, the cloud projects, looking at stuff like web assembly, do I put the brakes on that and put my smart people at trying to replatform my VM infrastructure to a different VM solution, and what value will come of it?
I have a little bit more independence. I'm relying on a different vendor than I am VMware? Eh, I don't see it. So let's talk about the elephant in the room, VMware Tanzu. It's Kubernetes. And I think this is the problem VMware had, it couldn't corner the market on Kubernetes. Kubernetes is Kubernetes, whether it's OpenShift, VMware, Rancher, it's Kubernetes. And I can take my applications that I'm building on top of Tanzu, and move those to another application platform, fairly simple, it's the advantage of being Kubernetes based, it is Kubernetes based, it is the blessing and the curse that VMware went down.
And every major, not even every major, every distribution has Kubernetes, every major distribution with Kubernetes has VMware vSphere support. So, I don't know if much changes for customers. I think the only thing that changes is that it's clear that VMware probably isn't going to lead the combination of stitching together VMware vSphere, vROps, and a bunch of other things to create a private cloud that's an alternative to AWS, I think that vision is over. VMware is the vSphere company, is the statement that Broadcom is making through this acquisition, Which brings me to partners, it's kind of exciting, right?
VMware is the vSphere company. It's not the storage company, it's not the networking company, it's not the governance company, it's not the security company, it is the vSphere VM company. And that gives partners some certainty to operate around. One, if customers want to migrate from vSphere, you know what, you'll be there to help to have the conversation. I think at the end of the day, it's going to be the same, if I was going to migrate from vSphere, I would've done it, it's the opportunities around it.
Figuring out hybrid infrastructure, how do you, now that we have some certainty, and we've created some certainty, how do I take my VMware VM base, build a private cloud around that, or build a private cloud, or a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, and manage my VMware landscape in a cost-effective way that doesn't get in the way? How do I integrate these bits and pieces? How do I make calls from AWS Lambda to Oracle Database running in my VMware vSphere environment, or to my ERP solution that's running in my VMware VPA environment?
All of these questions become problems or opportunities the partner ecosystem can answer without VMware mucking it up, or, as they say in the Apple community, Sherlocking your solution. You don't revolutionize a space, or introduce a new solution, hope that VMware won't come in and start to compete with you. I'm really excited about that and the ability for the channel to support that mid-size, that small mid-size business at scale. So, you know, overall, keep calm. Things are fine. It is disruptive, true.
No doubt about it. This is, for a lot of us, unnerving, the thought that VMware of the past that had introduced vExpert, and the VMware community and vAdmin community in general, it's no longer that era. But you know, we're in a great new era, we're in good hands. Talk to you next "CTO Dose".
