> Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND research, told The Register that VMware by Broadcom is “laser focused on high-revenue, high-margin business” and has priced its wares “just below the pain threshold for customers they care about.”<p>If you hike your prices by 10-15x, you only need 6-10% of customers to stay to maintain your revenue, reduce costs and massively increase profit margins!
> he found the IT department using two hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, and ... VMware. The CTO felt two hypervisors was one too many and considered a consolidation<p>Good move, and plenty more like this will happen.<p>But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. And companies like Broadcom are fine with that because market segmentation is a thing.<p>(Also I hate hate HATE The Register's tone - so happy I'm not a PMM who has to wine and dine them at RSA or Re:Inforce.<p>The moment RSA and these holdover 90s blog cartels like Register and DarkReading die, discourse in the space can become so much better.<p>Practitioner lead conferences like Bsides and practitioner blogs are superior to these kinds of rags that are written in conjunction with vendors)
I admit to not understanding or caring about the full scope of Computershare’s business (side note: that’s a dumbass name), but having been forced to suffer their software when working for a former company, it boggles my mind that they need 24,000 VMWare VMs, in addition to a bunch of Nutanix VMs.
I don't think I've ever seen to this degree such a misguided focus on short-term profit at the expense of driving away ALL future customers. At this point, who ever would even consider VMware for a new project or business? Vmware will exist only as long as their current customers exist. Being a VMware salesperson has to be a brutal job right now.
There are lots of details missing. VMware had a crazy amount of product and support SKUs. It is possible that they were vastly underpaying relative to what they should have been licensed for. Also, 24k VMs is a lot but core count is what matters. They could have been running that compute with insane overprovisioning, and Broadcom generally wants customers with REALLY HIGH core counts. Finally, the new SKUs that Broadcom are pushing consolidate lots of products together that would have previously been purchased separately. If they were _only_ vSphere customers, the hike might have come from now needing to be NSX and vSAN customers against their will.<p>All that said, lots of customers definitely had similar experiences; it's all over /r/vmware. Broadcom is not joking about wanting to cull the herd here.
The P.S. links to an interesting article about the Broadcom site UX peculiarities: <a href="https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/" rel="nofollow">https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/</a>
I wonder if this is why GEM suddenly stopped working! All of a sudden, I couldn't access my stock option platform for a previous employer through ComputerShare. The platform was suddenly shut down in April.
And Nutanix is working incredibly great (although that is not a big surprise considering it is "just" KVM with heavy modifications), I recently finished a small consulting gig at a SMB making the jump from VMWare to Nutanix.<p>It would not surprise me that soon Broadcom will realize they purchased a dead company, because according to my contacts at Nutanix the OP is not an edge case and small and large companies are migrating from VMWare to Nutanix and/or other solutions such as OpenStack in droves.
"Nutanix, he said, is now his champion for databases, all 128,000 of them, after delivering 1,000 percent better performance than another unnamed rival and pulling off tricks like recovering a forty-terabyte database in eight minutes."<p>... yeah. I like El Reg, but... come on. ONE THOUSAND MEGAPERCENT vs unnamed rival.<p>Nutanix has an in-house cassandra fork I believe, I wonder if they are weasel wording some linear scaling.