We finally found someone who loves Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware: Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Chief Commercial Officer, Judson Althoff, went on stage last week at Microsoft’s Customer and Partner Solutions event and observed the obvious: “Everyone wants to get off of VMware and get into the cloud.”

And once you’re in the cloud, you don’t need VMware any more.

That’s not entirely true – all the big cloud vendors offer hosted VMware, which is designed to be an easy on-ramp for organizations.  It allows big enterprises to vMotion their systems up to the cloud.  But they don’t want to stay there: it’s a lot more expensive than normal cloud and so these organizations transform into regular cloud ASAP.

Although we occasionally see VMware-based hosting offers, the reality is that VMware is an on-prem hosting solution.  On-prem isn’t going away, but the big easy enterprise money is moving to the cloud, where VMware really doesn’t have a story.

Even worse for Broadcom, the core value proposition for VMware has been shown to be commoditizable.  When VMware was new, it was the only solution (on x86 – other platforms had virtualization since the 60s).  Then Virtuozzo, Xen, and KVM came along – and they’re free.  In an on-prem world, VMware could retain an edge because they could say “we’re the virtualization that has support”.  But in the cloud, customers turn to Google or Amazon to ask questions about KVM, not VMware.

Is anyone going to be sad to see VMware go?

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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