Nutanix claims it has poached 30,000 VMware customers
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In hindsight, I was fortunate to have been a long-term Symantec Endpoint Protection customer when Broadcom acquired that business. It was painful, but at least I knew right away what to expect when they acquired VMware and was able to begin making migration plans immediately.
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Didn't VMWare send legal C&D letters to customers using their licensed software...under the valid terms of those licenses? I can't find links easily right now, but I swear I heard through the grapevine about it.
There's lots of ways of running a business. Suing your valid paying customers is definitely a "choice", but not likely to lead to continued sales.
There's lots of ways of running a business. Suing your valid paying customers is definitely a "choice", but not likely to lead to continued sales.
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Broadcom is in an interesting space. Not in terms of market or product segments, but in that nobody likes them.
They're like Oracle: The only people who can say anything nice about them aren't customers (and no, the executives making buy decisions aren't the customers, the people who have to deal with that decision are the customers).
They're like Oracle: The only people who can say anything nice about them aren't customers (and no, the executives making buy decisions aren't the customers, the people who have to deal with that decision are the customers).
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I don't doubt this since short term profits are easy when you gouge and backstab your customers. Regardless I hope their expectations collapse.
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Enterprise customer here, though my group doesn’t run the VMware infrastructure. We are absolutely moving away from VMware because of Broadcom.
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If I am remembering correctly, it was when they terminated their perpetual licenses. The C&D was about continuing to apply updates to the software after they cut you off and you didn't have a valid support contract.
I'm going to a conference next week about how to negotiate Software and SaaS contracts so this is all relevant info for me right now...
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Who’d have thought that removing most of your product range, removing the ability to purchase the product outright, refusing to support older versions and jacking up the price to make it unaffordable to anyone but the biggest companies at a time when on-premise virtualisation stacks were dwindling would drive them to their competitors? Who? Who, I ask you?
Even the massive Fortune 500 company I work for balked at their pricing - we’re moving more and more stuff to Azure and that which has to be hosted locally is on Nutanix.
Even the massive Fortune 500 company I work for balked at their pricing - we’re moving more and more stuff to Azure and that which has to be hosted locally is on Nutanix.
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Funny that people think the acquisition is considered a success. I can only see it being a success if you look at it through a venturevulture capitalism prism.
Yes they do have the current big players, the ones that take years to migrate if they bother to do so. But Broadcom has gotten so much bad press with regards to VMware that they will never get new big players. Thus the VMware business will slowly die.
Yes they do have the current big players, the ones that take years to migrate if they bother to do so. But Broadcom has gotten so much bad press with regards to VMware that they will never get new big players. Thus the VMware business will slowly die.
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Would love to see the full numbers of lost customers, though we’ll likely never see that.
I have to imagine that the only customers Broadcom is retaining at this point fall broadly (heh) in the following categories:
Broadcom have been it abundantly clear that they’re only interested in harpooning whales at this point. Message received. Everyone else has left or will be leaving soon enough.
I have to imagine that the only customers Broadcom is retaining at this point fall broadly (heh) in the following categories:
- Large customers that were already using most/all of the full cloud based tiers of VMWare
- Customers that are vendor locked for whatever reason, such the use of virtual appliances that are VMWare specific and/or will cost additional money to rebuild/migrate to another, or VMWare centric hardware (such VxRail) still under warranty
- Customers with little to no in-house IT that contract most of their needs out to MSPs and are hesitant to migrate for various reasons
Broadcom have been it abundantly clear that they’re only interested in harpooning whales at this point. Message received. Everyone else has left or will be leaving soon enough.
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Smack-Fu Master, in training
We went with Nutanix during our last hardware refresh cycle. The Broadcom acquisition of VMware was in the works, and I knew no good would come of it. Nutanix wasn't well established then, but I was impressed by the hyperconverged hardware combined with their hypervisor. It made maintenance and troubleshooting much easier than having separate server, network, and hypervisor vendors all point the finger at each other when something screwy went down. Five years later and we've jumped ship again to the Hyper-V/Azure stack. I don't know that it's necessarily cheaper, but the business prefers the subscription model to the jaw-dropping cost of replacing our server stacks. We also don't have to worry about physical hardware sitting in far-flung data centers. I don't see either Nutanix or VMware surviving another decade. Some businesses will keep their stuff out of the cloud for various reasons, but it's a shrinking market.
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I was shocked last year when I ran into someone still running Nutanix on VMware instead of AHV.
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Yup, same here. We were using the SMB cloud version and the subscription was due to be renewed when Broadcom took over. While we waited for the next 3 months to get a quote, I started testing the alternatives and moved over before the deadline.
Memory fails me, but I believe Broadcom contacted us 1 year later to sell us another subscription that was substantially more expensive.
I was like “Do you honestly believe we would be waiting and be without AV solution while doing that because you couldn’t be arsed to care for your customers? And now get off my lawn!”
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Sadly, the MBAs calculated this into the purchase price. They knew how many places wouldn't be able to move quick enough.
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Smack-Fu Master, in training
We had a couple VMware servers at one point running on Nutanix hardware because the vendors (one was Cisco) wouldn't officially support AHV.
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Using duck kwon do, I was able to locate:
https://meincmagazine.com/gadgets/202...st-letters-to-subscription-less-vmware-users/
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This is going according to plan. Broadcom's business model is to acquire something with a lot of customers, minimize costs by minimizing development, jack up the price to get as much money as possible before the customers leave, and then go find another target. They're a swarm of locusts always looking for the next field to strip bare.
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Annoyingly, a few years ago I had just finished migrating my current job away from their old clunky Hyper-V boxes to VMWare, when the news about Broadcom dropped.
Our needs are simple: redundant hosts for about 35 VMs (mostly for internal infrastructure).
So, back to Hyper-V we went, because we get killer education discounts from MS.
Hyper-V’s not my preference, by a long shot, but it mostly “just works” and costs us a fraction of what we’d spend on VMware to stay on with them, or going to someone like Nutanix.
I’ve learned to live with Hyper-V again. I do find its simplicity to be equally advantageous and annoying. Dead simple to setup and use, but I definitely miss the more fine grained controls and monitoring/analytics of VMware native tools.
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My old company went through this a few times as Broadcom bought different things. When they bought VMWare, our teams also started planning the migration immediately.
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We migrated 1600ish apps and services to a custom red hat open shift env, glad to see us drop the contract.
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I really hope he died in agony, and that there's a hell for him to be burning in with Thatcher.
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The entire disaster started when Avago bought Broadcom (and then renamed itself Broadcom). They raised prices of everything, VMWare was just a continuation of the policy.
I have an interesting anecdote which I heard from a VP of one of client companies. (I cannot dox them, sorry.)
Company A (the mentioned VP is from A) bought struggling company B. B makes a lot of stuff, among the other things some legacy chips, but still needed for certain devices, so there is some market. Then Avago buys Broadcom, which is also one of the few manufacturers in the field. Next step: raise chips' prices 3x. All customers now leave Broadcom, go to the remaining supliers. Suddenly, it is a free money for company A, because Broadcom/Avago decided to price themselves out of the market and as it is a legacy chip, there are no R&D costs.
I have an interesting anecdote which I heard from a VP of one of client companies. (I cannot dox them, sorry.)
Company A (the mentioned VP is from A) bought struggling company B. B makes a lot of stuff, among the other things some legacy chips, but still needed for certain devices, so there is some market. Then Avago buys Broadcom, which is also one of the few manufacturers in the field. Next step: raise chips' prices 3x. All customers now leave Broadcom, go to the remaining supliers. Suddenly, it is a free money for company A, because Broadcom/Avago decided to price themselves out of the market and as it is a legacy chip, there are no R&D costs.
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As near as I could tell, it seems Broadcom decided that VMWare wasn't viable for the long term, that too many trends meant a long term declining business, but that they could gouge their customers for a couple years - that might drive the customers away a little faster, but give them a lot more revenue for 5 or 6 quarters?
Which, this should be a lesson about how capitalism works - expect buggy whips to get REAL expensive shortly before you never need them again.
Which, this should be a lesson about how capitalism works - expect buggy whips to get REAL expensive shortly before you never need them again.
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Word is that Cisco call manager applicances will be supported on AHV sometime near the end of the year. At that point we will be migrating the very few servers left with ESXi to AHV immediately.
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Which isn't an unreasonable calculation, TBH. I have 20 years experience with VMware, but even before Broadcom bought it, I'd have hesitated to pick it for a new environment. Between the various OSS options for small-scale use (or Hyper-V if that's your thing), the extreme flexibility of the hyperscalers, and containerization for appliance-type situations there's a fairly narrow window of large-scale, on-prem virtualization where VMware makes sense. And I expect most of those cases already have it.
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Likewise. Planning began when the acquisition was announced. It will take time, but as we have for other products they've bought, we will be gone. D-day is our next licence renewal.
I know this is their business model and I know it works in the short term. I'm less convinced that it continues to work.
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I'm not sure about that. I'm in an industry where most of us are actively pulling back out of the cloud and back to on-prem. Turns out it's less expensive, particularly if you capex your hardware costs and software licensing. We are literally saving millions over our previous cloud deployments. And this includes housing that hardware across multiple data centers.
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Nutanix has been pushing so much FUD in the various channels since the acquisition announcement, I'm not surprised they've acquired that many clients.
However, how many of them have reached their first renewal period yet? I can't wait to see their faces when the sticker shock comes. If they thought Nutanix would be cheaper than VMware, they're in for a surprise.
However, how many of them have reached their first renewal period yet? I can't wait to see their faces when the sticker shock comes. If they thought Nutanix would be cheaper than VMware, they're in for a surprise.
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That definitely seems to be the strategy and is also fits with their software strategy in general for all the other products they acquired.
The might have been a bit too early on that take now that cloud deployments have slowed and suddenly some large companies are pulling back. We just run our own cloud, so there's always that strategy.
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Having integrated applications with both Oracle and SAP ERP's, there are 2 benefits to Oracle.
1. The tables and columns are named in a much more developer friendly way.
2. Oracle's Materialized Views are pretty awesome for reporting purposes. No other SQL database has them available. You can write a small lightweight app to reproduce the functionality of a mview fairly easily, but having it out of the box is nice.
I have nothing nice to say about Broadcom.
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It's not a single time that I heard a company executive explicitly say that they were fine making a beneficial short term decision because they wouldn't be around to deal with the consequences. All executives with that mentality don't work at Broadcom, but all of Broadcom's executives have that mentality.
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Same. The unparalleled greed and short‑term thinking of private equity really sucks.
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While big orgs of the sort mentioned here will no doubt be heavily going to things like Nutanix, I know a lot of medium and small (like us) places have gone to Proxmox. For anyone in that boat, I just learned last week about a pretty new FreeBSD based project called Sylve. It's clearly in a lot of the spirit of proxmox, but despite being insanely early days with plenty yet to have a GUI built it already has some UI niceties Proxmox doesn't. Might be worth following and checking back on or playing around with in a homelab or very small scale setup.
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