VMWare has been in the news recently after their acquisition by Broadcom. The news has been mostly negative. Broadcom announced that they were “simplifying” the organization after their $61bn acquisition went through.
As part of this simplification, VMWare eliminated:
2800 Jobs
One of the first actions Broadcom took was to lay off 2837 people across multiple locations.
Their partner program
VMWare claims that all active partners were invited to the new Broadcom partner platform. The total number of partners is ~10,000 less than reported in 2023. Either past VMWare or current VMWare is a liar.
The free ESXi product
This is bad news for hobbyists, but may drive them toward the excellent KVM hypervisor.
Perpetual licensing
They claim subscription is the industry standard, and I sadly agree.
Renewal pricing
The elimination of renewal pricing and the switch to subscription pricing are the changes likely to be felt the most across industries. There have been reports of people seeing 3x-10x increases in prices, though my organization was lucky, in that our pricing only doubled.
tl;dr
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMWare appears to be a bad deal for VMWare’s customers, partners, and staff. We had to eat the cost of three years of support to give us time to move all our systems to another solution, but those are the last dollars Broadcom will see from us.
