Edition Six
VMware Executive update:
What has happened in the Virtualisation space since Broadcom acquired VMware?
Broadcom changes
It is now approaching 6 months since Broadcom brought some controversial changes to their licence portfolio, following their acquisition of VMware for $69B last year. The most significant change was the announcement in December last year, when Broadcom confirmed the discontinuation of Perpetual licenses and SnS support renewals, and that moving forward they will exclusively offer Subscription licences for all of their portfolio.
This has sparked the most disruptive period for the Virtualisation market in close to a decade, pervasively affected any projects planned within customers datacentre infrastructures. With this in mind, we felt it was a good time to share our initial thoughts and experiences during this period.
What impacts have we found at Ultima?
In the past four months, our engagements with our VMware/Broadcom customer base have revealed concerns about the rapid license changes and their swift implementation. These changes have led to increased subscription costs for some customers, as they now include more features than customers have previously used.
Like many other software providers, VMware/Broadcom has shifted to a subscription model to remain competitive in the marketplace. Despite the associated costs, VMware continues to lead in datacentre virtualisation due to its extensive ecosystem.
Their vision is to guide customers on the hybrid cloud journey by integrating components of their flagship VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) into other portfolio bundles.
This strategy aims to drive adoption and enable customers to modernise to Hybrid Cloud through VMware technologies. The newly restructured licensing bundles offer a range of choices to support small to large enterprises, featuring their market-leading vSphere offering and popular additional add-on features like vSAN, SRM, and VCDR.
Findings at Ultima are that although some customers who have concerns with the price adjustments, there is still a significant number of customers who are remaining with VMware technologies at least in the short-term. We have seen some customers who have upcoming hardware refreshes who have decided to shift to alternative Hypervisors or public cloud offerings, and some are using Hybrid Cloud as a viable alternative so the options are available, however they may not necessarily make immediate savings.
How can Ultima help you?
As an experienced Advanced Partner Ultima is regarded as one of the UK’s leading VMware partners, having demonstrated repeatedly the ability to deliver on the highest levels of customer outcomes and expectations.
Specialising in hyperconverged infrastructure, mobility management, server and network virtualisation, data-centre virtualisation and cloud technologies, we design, implement and support a range of VMware solutions.
Our expertise includes integrating VMware products with a range of other technologies, providing tailored solutions based on real world experience, and our consultants are able to provide access to comprehensive product information, custom configurations and insight into product road-maps, helping ensure that our solutions achieve the ROI required by our customers.
