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I'm assuming they're paying much more than a football club.
There's also a legal side in this case because they're actually suing Broadcom: "Tesco claimed Broadcom hiked its VMware prices by about 175 percent in UK court filings."
Kit deals alone probably dwarf server licensing costs, not even close. But funny thing is nobody blinks at $150 replica shirts while a VMware bill gets a whole article written about it.
85% licensing savings on VMware, but who's actually tracking the follow-on costs? Migrations like this usually mean new hypervisor training, integration headaches, maybe consultants. Curious if that number nets out the migration spend or just compares sticker prices.
> The soccer organization confirmed this week to The Register that it has moved its stadium’s server, storage, and networking infrastructure to HPE solutions delivered through HPE’s hybrid cloud management platform, GreenLake.
This is just a much worse version of AWS. Obsession with maintaining some degree of physical control over infrastructure drives many organizations to absolute insanity. Skip the hybrid nonsense. Find a CTO with some balls.
I would argue that absolute insanity is surrendering all control of infrastructure to cloud providers. Especially when you are using managed services that lock you in, making any plans of migrating way ridiculously painful.
It takes a CTO with cojones to actually own your infrastructure.
> Obsession with maintaining some degree of physical control over infrastructure drives many organizations to absolute insanity.
Well... thank the current US administration for that one. The move they did with that ICC judge, cutting him off from anything digital, was a wakeup call for us Europeans that we can take nothing for granted any more.
Physical operations is the “you had one job” of running a stadium. Gillette even has their own wastewater plant. Some basic rack and stack for IT infra that they could offsite next to all the IT infra they can’t offsite should be child play to them.
Nonsense. Renting servers is the easiest way to bankrupt your company. Look at all the capacity shortages going on right now. Price will continue to outpace bare metal and controls will get tighter.
Not to mention there are many scenarios where cloud connectivity is not an option.
> Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has 20,000 network access points, 1,849 IPTV screens, and 519 CCTV screens. It hosts about 63,000 viewers
A decent part of that is probably important to be working on the day of a football match. They already own a suitable building, probably with decent backup power, so running their own servers seems both more reliable and cheaper than renting.
There is a 100% chance that someone in Broadcom exec team is making money shorting themselves.
Or else some insider assurance that they'd get so much money from government or some big customer that they could run their products into the ground no matter what. But enterprises are not as locked in as people think.
Broadcom has absolutely zero interest in the long-term future of VMware. Their only goal is to squeeze as much money out of it as possible before it goes bust.
Let's say that VMware had a $10B revenue with a $9B operating cost. If 0.1% of their megacorp customers is responsible for 20% of that revenue while only being 1% of the support needs, then ditching the other 99.9% of customers reduces revenue to $2B while the operating cost can be reduced to $90M - increasing profit from $1B to $1.91B.
Those huge customers are quite locked in, so you can squeeze them for a couple of years before they leave. They have their own in-house support teams, so you can cut all L1/L2 support people. You're killing the product, so you can cut all developers except a handful to patch CVEs. The smaller customers who are leaving are doing some after a massive price hike, so you get a nice one-time renewal bonus while they desperately try to move to alternatives.
No need to do any shorting when you're generating massive profits for a couple of years. The plan when VMware is dead? Cut up its corpse in tiny parts, sell them off, buy another company, repeat the same strategy. As long as the total money they manage to extract from VMware is more than its acquisition cost, Broadcom has succeeded.
I didn't realize how addicted some orgs were to VMWare until Broadcom bought them and I witnessed zero people migrate to alternatives. It's been one of the single biggest shocks to me in my career. Watching them get squeezed openly and ruthlessly and just accepting it. I've only ever seen Microsoft pull that off before.
Some software companies sort of stumble into treating their customers as hostages while others make an art form of it. Computer Associates, which is part of Broadcom now, has been doing that for decades.
Note that execs are usually given stock grants in part to ensure they are long rather than short.
But you'd not be making money shorting Broadcom (AVGO); they're up on the year and YTD. They're an "AI stock" now, doing custom silicon for AI companies, and that's all that matters.
VMware is just going to be squeezed, rather than trying to acquire new customers. The entire corporate market is almost a rounding error compared to how big the datacenter boom is.
Did VME migration last year, licensing side easy - real work's rewriting automation. Anything scripted against vCenter API (Terraform, PowerCLI) needs rework, VME's API compat isn't 1:1. Budget extra sprint for that or ops team eats it later.
I'm assuming they're paying much more than a football club.
There's also a legal side in this case because they're actually suing Broadcom: "Tesco claimed Broadcom hiked its VMware prices by about 175 percent in UK court filings."