Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects.
Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware
Chances are that the current leadership doesn’t care about how VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase metrics that Wall Street considers important.
Expect major cuts in R&D, receptionists, travel expenses, general benefits, and virtually no hiring of college grads or interns. You’ll be on the phone in a queue for hours to get outsourced IT support.
Support of open source should be the least of your worries.
Stock price might go up though…
You argued the exact opposite? You're saying it's all about EBITDA...
Not sure if that was a typo, eggcorn, or pun on truth and fiction post-acquisition...
One of the opportunities at VMware is monetize the open source investment more effectively, especially Kubernetes. I still don't totally understand how they plan to do that but wish them (you) all well.
Disclaimer: Former employee of VMware
The ecosystem is thriving and because the k8s platform was built to be pluggable; it is an actual platform. Docker (the company) tried to monopolize and monetize when they built Swarm, and that’s why they lost the cluster orchestrator space IMO. Docker (the tool) is just a tool, not really something you can monetize easily. Docker (the image format) is where most of the value lives, there isn’t much value to extract there as it’s an open protocol.
Docker (the tool) was commoditized by k8s, and now there isn’t really any way to charge for a differentiated implementation. Providing a registry and a best-in-class Docker for Desktop experience isn’t going to be a huge TAM.
Kubernetes is fine.
Docker failed because they tried to compete with Kubernetes, lost and then didn't have a clue how to find a niche where they could enrich the Kubernetes ecosystem.
- the core vSphere hypervisor and management software
- Vmware Cloud on AWS which is pretty big on its own, plus other cloudy things like datrium / disaster recovery as a service.
- cybersecurity (carbon black and secure state), which is similar to what Symantec does, will be an interesting overlap
- endpoint management (security for desktops, mobile) which was AirWatch
- management (monitoring & automation) aka. vRealize and Cloud Health
- workspace / single sign on, similar to okta (Workspace ONE)
- virtual desktops (Horizon) which compete with Citrix
- software defined networking (NSX) which competes with F5, Cisco, Juniper etc.
- modern apps (Tanzu) which is largely open source... containers & developer tools & data services & agile consulting, e.g. Spring, Apache Tomcat, RabbitMQ, Greenplum, Wavefront, Bitnami / Kubeapps, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Labs (now Tanzu Labs)
I could probably do a lot of the same thing with Linux itself, but the web interface is so nice, I'm keeping it as long as it continues to be free for home use.
Where VMware shines is when you want to virtualize multiple datacenters and manage them all from a single browser window. Getting hundreds of hosts and datastores managed all under one vCenter umbrella all while eliminating single points of failure, while not trivial, is the bread and butter of VMware and it works very well once it's all up and running.
Taking driver code out of Linux and just running it inside the hypervisor has to be the most brazen violations possible.
If you mean, did they remove the vmkLinux layer from their product? Yes, they did, back in 2019 soon after they won the lawsuit on procedural grounds (the court ruled the person who brought the suit didn't have standing, and it was upheld on appeal).
For those reading along at home, that's a shim layer to link GPLed code into the closed source hypervisor.
It's absurd that the company responsible for some of the most blatant license violations in the industry (and is still actively continuing to violate after a decade) is trying to push itself as open source friendly.
I understand why you might want to, I just don’t understand what the rule would be.
Additionally they didn't publish the source to even the GPLed drivers they shipped as binaries, before even talking about the core hypervisor itself.
Again, this is just my opinion so I could end up be wrong. Or maybe I am just in a bad mood today... meh
Disclaimer: forced Broadcom customer here
Should Broadcom do all those things, they run a substantial risk of degrading the products offered by VMware, which is a poor business decision.
Given the very profitable state of VMware, it's a lot more likely that they will only introduce minor changes.
It used to be Product X becomes Websphere Product X, then disappears from their salespeople's lips about 5 years later.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/18/how-wall...
The vast majority of why people are VMware proponents is down to their virtualisation software. It's why we were big resellers for a while. But for the last few years, their own sales people have only wanted to talk about security products, quite plainly acknowledging stagnant growth in on premise virtualisation.
But virtualisation is in my view the only place they've made it big. You've just linked a Reddit post in /r/cybersecurity talking about security products and every reply is about how to replace ESXi. It'll be interesting to see how their future pans out.
VMware Workstation blew my mind when I saw it demoed in (I think) mid-2000 [1]. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was seeing - it seemed that revolutionary, running an OS inside an OS on a desktop. I wonder whether VMware's problem nowadays is that, having basically invented the technology, they've become almost synonymous with the category of virtualisation tech - kind of like "Hoover" for home appliances - and their other products get less attention.
(I know that VMware didn't invent the idea of virtual machines. But my perception is that at that time, virtualised OSs were mostly found in mainframes.)
When people think of virtualisation, they think VMware as a key player in building and pushing the technology.
Like when you think of the first smartphone you think of the Apple iPhone, despite there being "smartphones" prior to its release.
IBM, actually, on mainframes.
I imagine someone could use docker instead of VMware in most cases, and if that's not possible then hire some people to make it so.
Vendor lockin is a scary thing, the people who are really going to hurt here are mega super corps who are now going to have to pay out the nose. If you're a smaller company, you should be moving to docker or another open source solution anyway.
I would argue that there are more Docker containers running on a VM, running on top of VMware than there are Docker containers running on bare metal servers.
Both VMs and containers can be used and misused in a number of ways, but rarely can you replace a VM on VMware ESXi with Docker. There's still a massive business case for VMware and the only real competitors are Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer (if it's still called that).
You also have to remember that there's a crazy big Microsoft world out there, Docker and containers still aren't of much use here. While this could run on Hyper-V, many just pick ESXi because it's what they know (No one was ever fired for choosing VMware).
Ether figure it out now, or in 2 years when VMware starts to suck.
Then again, all the big companies I know put things off until the last moment.
If I was a better developer I'd be putting together a project right now that allows you to run all your happy legacy Windows software with Docker.
Shouldn't be hard to raise a bit of funding for such a project assuming you have the right background.
But, this does offer incentive for outsiders to create competitive stacks.
If you are rolling your own replacement of VMware, what happens if a couple (or even say 20 out of your 5000) of your “parent” hosts go down. Will all of your guests auto-migrate to healthy hosts?
And we are not talking about Kubernetes or similar here. That is very different. You don’t roll your own VMware alternative. You just use VMware.
When you refer to smaller company and mention docker, or open source, it's only those that are tech startups, or close to the field with the skill to operate in this fashion. The majority of small and medium companies don't have the skills or resources to do this. Over time that changes, but it's completely unrealistic to think that they can get away quickly from VMware (even when their overworked IT person would like to.)
You can run Windows in a docker container so this would support legacy applications.
I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not insurmountable. If all else fails, Virtual box is open source
It's been a few years since I've worked with bare metal, but doesn't Docker require a hypervisor for the containers?
You could swap to KVM or Hyper-V, but transitioning an org's hypervisor on bare metal is a massive task any way you cut it.
I was on a team that ran performance critical stuff for a reasonable sized ecommerce business - moving from vmware to bare metal was fantastic on every level from api’s to performance and reliability.
The enterprise spirit is stong in vmware.
> My hope is that Michael Dell vetos this merger, from my accounts of Michael and the people I know who are employed by Dell, Michael is a great leader and a good human being and that is the most important thing, not profit at any cost.
I don't know if the author is serious. This deal has Michael Dell financial engineering written all over it. He's not going to veto anything. Dell is all about enriching himself with moves like this rather organically grow a company.
> Seems like their software strategy is to buy a business which doesn't have much room to grow but is extremely entrenched, and then reduce staffing and raise prices as much as possible.
- xcp-ng[1] is a support-available fork of XenServer. Migration[2] can be performed using export to OVA format and subsequent import into the built-in Xen-Orchestra interface.
- proxmox-ve[3] provides a management UI for Linux Virtual Machine (LVM) and Linux Containers (LXC) hosts and provides various vendor migration guides[4]. Both commercial and community support[5] is available.
- The Xen Hypervisor[6] is capable of hosting x86 and ARM virtual hosts, and their project provides a VMware migration guide[7]
[1] - https://xcp-ng.com/
[2] - https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migratetoxcpng.html#from-vmware
[3] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve
[4] - https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox...
[5] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/support
[6] - https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/
[7] - https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Migration_from_VMware
It's not the lower level primitives here that are valuable from VMware, it's the higher level abstractions built on top of them that facilitate easier management and use by (relatively) less technical people.
You can give a "good at Windows" type technician a few hours of training and they can put together a usable vCenter deployment, including things like corporate SSO and such. They can drag and drop things around and it'll mostly work. And when things go wrong and this person is confused about what to do, they can call up support for help.
Obviously, this is centered on-prem, which is indeed shrinking - but a lot of orgs have a lot of investment in stuff running on site, and there are still plenty of cases where having e.g. lots of storage and enough compute to "process" it in some way physically close to office users can speed up their workflows.
Disclaimer: I am an ex-employee of VMware.
This is something that the HN crowd repeats as if it were an obvious axiom where no scrutiny is needed. While I'm sure it's true that there's a general movement towards cloud-based infrastructure, there is a very real and non-trivial part of the IT infrastructure of any country that will not move to the cloud in the coming decade, if it ever will. This general movement is not the same thing as "everything will eventually have moved".
The hypothesis that on-site virtualization somehow is an obviously dying technology assumes that it must be true that on-site hosting will stop existing, which I have a very hard time believing. If nothing else (and there are plenty of "elses"), strict data security and privacy concerns will keep on-site hosting moated for a long time.
Which is based upon KVM - AIUI.
https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-sy...
The current solution to business management feels suboptimal. If companies are like persons maybe they should be organized with a more integrated 'body', where the 'head' doesn't have total power to sell out the rest of the integrated parts for its own gain. Co-op like organizational structures might avoid this issue, for example.
Just like analysts said IBM brought RedHat mainly for Openshift platform and I think there is some truth to it. Seems Broadcom has brought VMWare for their Tanzu platform which is direct competitor of Openshift. It is less about virtualization in corporate data centers which many agree here is legacy business at this point.
Why does a chipmaker want/need to expand into enterprise software? Shouldn't they be expanding to making different chips?
The web page for their software offerings is at https://software.broadcom.com/ . The interesting thing you'll notice is that they do not list any specific software they offer (e.g. Symantec for enterprise security, which by the way is separate from Norton now). Rather they sell you on their ability to deliver on four specific enterprise functional needs.
They won't answer your call to buy their suite unless you're in the Fortune 500. They will try to sell you on their whole suite. They will upsell you on any new acquisition, eg VMWare.
They might renew my personal VMWare Fusion license for another year but would probably close that down soon for not being core. On the M1 I've moved on anyway to UTM.
EDIT: word choice
The cool thing about UTM is that it runs hardware virt and emulation, so you can run x86 on M1, which Vmware Fusion cannot do.
You’re thinking that Broadcom acts as a company with a technological vision. This is a totally not the case and the CEO is very open about that.
Today’s Broadcom is a company that optimizes the financial performance of technology assets.
There are no long term plans.
Can someone more financially literate (or with direct experience in the stock market) explain this discrepancy to me?
(comment made at ~9:33am ET, stock market opened a few minutes ago)
As the deal becomes increasingly likely to go through, the stock price will likely gradually shift up to match the deal price.
1. The deal might not go through, or the terms might change.
2. You might not be able to get 100% cash for your shares.
[1] https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/e...
Especially from the Pivotal portfolio such as RabbitMQ, GreenPlum, Spring, Hibernate, etc... although I'm sure most here couldn't care less about Spring related projects.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and used to be part of the Hibernate team
I had concerns that Vertx was bundled into that portfolio too, but RH to rescue again.
I feel like Pivotal has been doing a great job lately - especially with Spring. I'd hate to see Broadcomm mess with this, but it feels highly possible.
The ordering/renewal process was so messed up by the transition that for approximately 18 months it was almost impossible to get a quote or place an order, even to renew an existing subscription, long enough that Symantec started just giving out subscription extensions to tide people over until the order process worked again.
Probably. 6 months ago they were looking at acquiring SAS (which didn't go anywhere). The core competencies for that of those companies are even less related to what Broadcom does.
But at the time virtualization was considered as something "to keep that old Windows NT server/software running" - not foundational for all cloud services ever.
That said, acquisitions can work if there is due diligence. I'm in a company that has acquired several companies in a related field. Each of the companies have had complementary products, and the cultures were vetted to be similar ours before purchase, ie small groups (30-50 people) who have demonstrated high skill, high trust, and low ego. Finally, there has been an effort keep groups generally autonomous while finding ways to synergize employees and services. There has been a strong feeling of working together. Groups have been willing to share their expertise and experience with other.
I guess in other words: the acquisition is a good idea, even if a product is subsumed into another product, there is plenty of real work to go around for employees to do. If you have to promptly fire people "because redundancy," it wasn't being done to improve your position in the field.
It depends on what you mean by "end up well" and who, exactly, is meant by "acquirer" and "acquired". Yes, they're lucrative and worthwhile from the point of finance people, a rarified sliver of stake-holders and the law firms who buzz around to service all these. If they weren't you would not be seeing them as much.
From the point of view of technology advancement, the professionals who want to actually WORK in these domains, and the customers who depend on the products? No. These mergers/acquisitions are at best a mixed bag and more often a downgrade, or worst of all, a career-derailing adjustment.
I have no idea if the 1 in 4 number is correct, but it feels reasonable.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/market...
It's just a gut feeling, I have no data to back it up.
If you mean recession, as defined by two consecutive quarters of dropping GDP - if GDP drops, stock markets drop. Not sure the directionality there, but the two are usually part and parcel.
If stock prices drop, it's a great time for acquisitions if you're sitting on cash.
I suspect any time stock markets drop sufficiently, you'll see increased M&A activity, regardless of whether it is prolonged enough to count as a recession.
To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly
Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Since software isn't their core business, they pay an external company to keep their software running. Like it or not, cloud providers are for software companies, and most companies have no interest in becoming a software company. They might have some small groups that do analytics or software in-house, and those groups might use cloud providers, but all the essential software will be run by a company you can call when something breaks, or if you're big enough embeds some staff in your office.
It's just good sense to outsource non-core functions. Software companies outsource hosting and datacenter stuff to AWS, etc. Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory minimums for hardware support on network switches and servers. Cockpit makes it dead simple to run.
Oracle performance is so awful the license terms do not allow you to release performance benchmarks or comparative analysis against other databases. it also has all the same heavy lifting you need to focus on for things like galera clusters or postgres, so theres no clear win unless you like paying Larry for the privilege of slow transactionals on a hyperconverged iron beast, or youre too lazy to figure out ODBC.
And Symantec so openly hates their customers they now bundle a cryptominer with their software. before that their incompetence was so blinding Google had to step in and force them to give up their CA business.
"enterprise" software is an absurd proposition for anyone smart enough to realize their business is more than just the end product. to everyone else, these companies are borderline predatory.
Do you have any sources for this? I worked at a company developing NFV appliances, we always had much higher network throughput on VMware than we did using KVM without using some type of convoluted vswitch alternative or PCI passthrough.
VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD, delegate different permissions and roles to users/groups, manage upgrades, interact with PowerShell and other APIs, it has integration into Dell and Cisco solutions, all sorts of additional features you won't find running CentOS and KVM without adding more 3rd party software on top and cobbling it together.
The money is of course important, but these providers are smart. They take only what they can and not more. Which is still big money. And while Oracle & co. would never make it into any company I can make a decision for, I don't think that keeps them awake at night - there are enough (big!) fish in the ocean.
Bingo! If you are a manufacturing company, you care about two things:
1) does this software do the job I need?
2) does this software cost less than the value I get out of using it?
If the answer is "yes and yes" then -- congratulations! you made a sale!
Sure, if some other company comes in and says "hey, I can do the same job, but cheaper," the customer would listen. But so long as the software works good enough, then the externalities of support contracts, billing, "enterprisey-stuff" may matter more than features or performance.
I don't except to the degree that the product is more or less suitable for my business needs. And note I said product, which KVM by itself is not. If I'm going to use KVM--and, yes, I likely would rather than VMware unless I otherwise needed VMware for some reason--I'd be buying it as part of a supported commercial Linux distribution.
The health care organizations overwhelmingly use third party EHR/EMR systems and schools use third party companies for enrollment (Blackboard).
It doesn’t make sense to bring any those in house.
Remember, not only are most non-software companies better at their business than they are at software, they're also not hiring from the same tech talent pool, they're not paying their tech people as much, they're not letting the tech run their business.
I've got several clients that pay over 500k/year to a SaaS ERP vendor. The ERP system is the very definition of enterprise software.
What would you suggest I advise my clients when it comes to their finance, inventory, order management, logistics etc?
I guess they could piece together various SaaS solutions to create some sort of composable microservice based system to meet their needs but that's a massive engineering overhead when they can just get all of the functionality they need on one big fat enterprise ERP system.
The cosmetics manufacturer I work with does not care about what the technologists (people like you and me) care about. They just want to run their manufacturing and wholesale operation and if Oracle are offering one system that does it all, why wouldn't they take that deal?
An ERP is basically a database with an interface with business logic built in. Certainly not something you want to do in Excel.
Not just Linux but IT in general. It may have to be about security; my impression is that at least some of the widespread successful attacks in recent years might have been prevented if non IT companies had their own IT department, servers and in house security teams. Relying on an external provider is cheap and comfortable, until the day a single vulnerability screws all its customers data in a single day.
I think you vastly underestimate the cost of on-prem IT, especially for small and medium sized businesses. The "floor" cost of your own IT is many, many orders of magnitude higher than a subscription to something like Office 365 for something like 50 people.
"Normal" people don't use cloud services because they're lazy, they do it because the economics of rolling your own IT does not make sense, and hasn't since the days when it stopped being your only option.
But, even thinking of health care systems is thinking of big businesses. How does a road construction company justify an IT department or security team? Think of businesses like that. They have have an IT guy who manages services they use and is an expert at using those.
Most businesses are small to medium in size and non-tech.
Small businesses with in house It get hacked waaaaasy more.
In this case, they have no need for VMWare or Oracle.
Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to, which allows them to float through their careers fairly unchallenged.
At one point in time, IBM had this market position. Then Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon and Google.
Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable?
If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that businesses buying the Google Apps suite is nonsensical, because the only reason you'd ever use Google is because you're a "careerist" that "only know" Google.
That's obviously not true, Gmail and the rest of the Google suite have been market-leading for many years, because they are good solutions that solve real problems. Presumably the same thing goes for the Microsoft Office suite, and so on.
Um... perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines.
Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that maybe the technology is less of a differentiator in the overall effectiveness of a company’s IT environment than the people running it.
And with IT staffing supply having lagged behind demand (as also evidenced by relatively high salaries in IT vs many other professions), you could easily argue that it was (still is?) historically more difficult to hire good IT people than in many other professions.
And arguably that’s making outsourcing of IT needs relatively more attractive than outsourcing of other business functions where reasonably competent leadership and staffing is easier to come by.
And arguably, capturing many of the benefits of Open Source require more IT competency than using off the shelf mainstream commercial software. If I’m using the same crap that everyone of my competitors is using, none of us win or lose on that. But when using Open Source, I’m more likely to depend on the quality of my IT leadership and staff to outcompete my competitors. And unless a CEO is quite IT literate, s/he probably doesn’t want that additional headache of becoming good at figuring out how to hire good IT leadership.
So I’d hazard a guess, that insourcing and the use of Open Source will become more attractive for many corporations only if/when IT salaries drop more in line with other professions.
I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up.
I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up.
If these (and the endless examples of paying professionals) are a tax for stupidity and laziness, then everyone is lazy and stupid. If you're not a software company, there's a good chance it's worth it to save the time to pay someone to set it up for you. Also, if Joe's Fish Market wants a POS system and needs a server for it and he decides to set it up himself, if he gets it up and running, what are the chances it'll stay up to day and not have a firewall issue? Probably pretty low compared to if a professional did it.
Joe wants to focus on selling fish. That's where he's a pro. I don't know anything about fish, but I could set up a server for him. We all have our own skills, and it's often worth while to leverage other people's skills, because they'll do it faster, better, and it will likely end up cheaper after time and security are taken into consideration.
One part of the dynamic, simplified: big companies can show quickest cost savings by laying off employees; this satisfies anxious shareholders during the bumpy times by suggesting that management is wiling to make "hard decisions." Such companies cannot quickly re-tool their technology stacks nor renegotiate 3-year software contracts. B2B companies tend to do very well as long as they are not solely focused on their startup/growth/pre-IPO customers, who get hit hard.
Here are some arguments for post-downturn tech growth: 1981 and the use of the PC + Lotus/WordPerfect/BASIC for efficient local compute 1990 and the surge of the LAN to replace centralized IT 2001 and the swell of SaaS 2008 and the swell of cloud 2022 and the .....
My role also encompasses many “CIO-like” functions, but my area of expertise is in application development and I look to hire strong leaders in the other areas (or move certain tech domains entirely into other functions — eg our warehouse management system lives within our operations group, and me and my team help in an advisory capacity but don’t “own” the budget or WMS strategy).
https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/endpoint-secur...
(the VMWare owned product isn't CrowdStrike, that just had the best SEO page with a clear description. VMWare have Carbon Black which is the other dominant player in this market https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/whats-new/carbon-black.ht... )
I can't imagine it being cheaper to build everything yourself on top of just plain KVM, or even LXC.
You can see people spending millions of dollars a year to keep from having to deal with Linux as evidence that they are stupid. Or you can see it as evidence that Linux really is that bad. It works both ways.
VMware gives you a thing people can be trained on and certified on, a brand you can hire for and screen resumes on, a consistent environment which behaves in a predictable way that you really can turn employees into replacable cogs. Any helpdesk or admin employee can deal with VMware, any MSP, any tech recruiter, and a lot of training companies. You can get backup systems which "support VMware" and storage which integrates with VMware snapshots, and reporting tools which work with VMware.
It's almost not about the tech at all, it's about how do you build companies on shifting sands? You define interfaces for components which can be plugged together. "VMware" is an API or interface that the business can work to; vendors can say "deploy this OVF to VMware", sales can say to the business "this thing we need works with VMware" or to the customers "we can work with your VMware" or "our offering is trustworthy because we use VMware" and the customer recognises the name. HR can say "we need to hire people who know VMware" and that means something fairly specific to the wider world. "runs on Linux" and "people who know Linux" are wildly, wildly, variable and vague things which could mean "ran a website, minimum wage" or "turns SELinux off to make things run" or "was SRE for FAANG" or "did a PHD in AI for tuning networking stacks in HPC applications but doesn't know anything else".
You make software by defining interfaces and components that can be plugged together to make larger systems. Brands are that, for tech. Like you hire someone who "knows React" not someone who "is a programmer" because that's too vague and is as likely to get you someone who worked on a Java CRUD program or someone who worked on a Python log analyser. Like you hire a "service delivery manager" or a "customer account manager" and not "an employee".
Broadly speaking, anyone generalising the world into suits and techies needs a translation layer between them and anyone else.
A friend uses VMWare in an IT role at a medium sized company. They don’t have a software engineering team, just a bunch of users and an IT skeleton crew; so it makes sense for them.
Microsoft has a monopoly on Corporate Domains/OS as it is.
Have you ever considered the other way around? That is, “What changes with age that would make someone over 40 prefer outsourcing a problem to an enterprise?”
It’s possible that this trend is a result of a different perspective.
Something I saw in action building a startup is that the fewer people you have on your team, the more efficient they are.
As you grow, it’s wise to focus your headcount on your core competency and outsource everything else so that you are committing the organizational expense of more employees to all and only what you need as a business.
Of course, enterprise stuff is not all roses. You still have to have someone with product expertise. There’s vendor lock-in. Enterprise software is often oversold. Etc etc.
There is no panacea, just stuff that works better in different situations.
I worked at companies as a software developer from 1996 - 2012 that had to manage their own infrastructure. But today, the only company that I worked for back then that would be managing their own infrastructure today is the one that has mainframes and hardware that handle the backends for lottery systems across the US.
By 2012, there was a slow shift to the cloud.
I first was exposed to how large enterprises worked in 2017. I was hired to lead two green field implementations. But at the last minute they decided to “move to the cloud” neither they nor I knew anything about the cloud. They hired consultants and a Managed Service Provider. Of course the internal IT department was vigilantly defending their turf and the “consultants” were old school Netops folks who only knew how to “lift and shift” and duplicate an on prem infrastructure and all of the red tape to the cloud and of course it was more expensive than just using a colo.
I spent the next six months after the decision was made studying AWS and getting a certification not because I value certifications (I don’t). But it gave me a guided learning path to know what I didn’t know. It did open my eyes to what I wanted to do - work with companies - specifically developers and operations to show them how to actually take advantage of cloud and not just do lift and shifts - ie true “Devops”.
I left that company and went to a small startup for two years where I learned everything I know about “cloud application modernization” and then ended up in Professional Services at AWS.
Until I started working with large enterprises and government organizations from the consulting side, I never appreciated the concerns of large enterprises and how they aren’t in the “tech” business and it does make sense to outsource that knowledge - not to ProServe we don’t do that type of work - to external partners.
As far as VMWare, as silly as it sounds on the surface. Companies actually use VMWare to manage hybrid infrastructure on the cloud and on prem as a “single pane of glass”.
https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/
I personally don’t deal with those implementations. I stick with app dev.
New companies, too. There's a lot to be said for paying someone to make problems go away. Not everyone wants to write their own software or change their own oil.
"Use proxmox" - fucking lol
Yes I know how to do app dev + cloud Net ops, it’s kind of my thing.
Companies don't buy companies, they buy IP, as I understand it.
Of course, it goes both ways and laws often favor the strong against the weak. But it is not all one-sided.
Is that really the case? Does it work? Isn't Instagram basically cloning TIkTok right now? and cloned Snap before that?
Apple with Alfred, Spotlight, F.lux etc are also examples. Seems like for software, either patents aren't utilized or simply can't be enforced.
That's called competition
Broadcom is paying for the huge enterprise customer base, sales and support connections, mindshare, and engineering org that has proven adaptable to market demands.
I would be shocked if every single 'big' tech company didn't use _some_ vmware product _somewhere_ internally. Their software portfolio is a hell of a lot bigger than just the actual vmware product. Example: where I work we use the vmware product Carbon Black for 'endpoint protection', which as I understand it is virus scanning + some amount of port monitoring.
You are quite wrong…
There is no reason for the west to allow Chinese companies to compete in their markets. Reciprocal market access or no access at all.
If western trade agreements forbid companies of a certain size from selling locally there is no alternative for Asian companies but to split or exit the market. We aren't helpless passengers on a worldwide economic joyride.
Also are you talking about Israel or Bangladesh? They are in Asia too.
it's not bizarre in the least if you consider any of the metrics that attempt to quantify corporate size and holdings.
Here's a market cap index[0], do you notice anything?
One thing that I notice is that every company in the top 25 is either American (.. or by some legal stretches, Irish) or from somewhere in Asia.
>Really didn't expect to see this dog whistling on HN.
"We can stop and let Asian tech giants eat us alive." is neither coded, nor suggestive -- nor is it written in such a way as to avoid condemnation or blame, It's a plain statement.
Can you describe how it's a dog whistle, and to signal which faction? I don't get it.
Asia is too vast for a group of people to be against the entirety, no? At least I haven't ran into the anti-Asia faction, yet; but I have ran into plenty of anti-country folks.
[0]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...
It may be inevitable but I think I have a solid idea to at least check its explosive growth.
The CEO and the board (includes President) ought to be personally civil as well as criminally liable for any actions of the employees, contractors, or agents of the company if they cannot prove that the employees, contractors, or agents acted against company policy. Elimination of the "right to work" is a precondition to this proposal.
Sure but the problem here is can you find and retain the people who can do that work, if you are a big lumbering "un-interesting" company where tech is not your core focus? In most cases the answer is "no".
There's a reason major software vendors provide professional services. If their customers could reliably hire and (most importantly) retain experts on their own, they wouldn't need professional services.
There's no reason the company selling them support couldn't be providing support for QEMU btw. If it met their needs otherwise I'm sure they'd consider it.
Plenty of companies seem to be OK with using GPL2-licensed Linux, why wouldn’t qemu be the same?
With a bit more planning and a larger environment and more licensing, and not much more tech skills, you'll have redundant trunked network links, it will migrate VMs between nodes to balance load, integrate with the node IPMI management to power hosts down when the load is light and power them on when the load increases, and for enough money on licensing it will keep two VMs on different host nodes in sync down to the CPU instruction in case one host fails nobody will notice. Also with not much tech skills.
And when I say "not much tech skills" you do need to understand enough about computing to plan it and cable things in properly and deal with VLANs and subnets and ISOs and DNS, routing, and VMware's way of doing networking, and the basics. But you need to know approximately nothing about /etc/ or XML or YAML, cluster quorums, elections, filesystem locking, heartbeat or watchdog services, distributed consensus protocols, package management, LVM, systemd, hypervisor subsystems, PAM modules, Kerberos, webservers, databases, Unix permissions, or etc.
I'm under no illusions that it's cheap, or bug-free, or that you never need to SSH in and poke it ever, or that it's the right thing for every task, or that it's the modern way. But it's an amazing packaging up of a lot of things into a worldbeating product, and its integration with Dell specifically - Dell hosts, Dell EMC storage - is such a good fit that makes me surprised and sad that Dell would sell VMware.
