Dive Brief:
- VMware parent company Broadcom rolled out plans for an enhanced enterprise solution that delivers “public cloud scale and agility with private cloud security, resilience and performance” in a Tuesday announcement.
- “Virtualization has helped customers save lots of money by increasing the density of virtual machines onto single servers,” Paul Turner, VP of products, VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom, said during a briefing last week. “But we can do more than that — we can virtualize the entire data center.”
- VMware Cloud Foundation 9 bundles new and existing private cloud capabilities onto a platform that incorporates a unified self-service operations and automation dashboard and improved memory tiering for data-intensive analytics. VCF 9 is currently in beta testing and has no firm release date, the company said.
Dive Insight:
VMware's new private cloud bundle arrives just one month after the first major VCF product update since Broadcom finalized its acquisition of the company in November.
The July rollout of VCF 5.2 followed months of customer speculation about price increases, licensing changes and other potential disruptions to the VMware product line.
“The pace at which we made the change and the quality of change that we have made has been absolutely challenging for our customers,” Prashanth Shenoy, VP of marketing for cloud platform, infrastructure and solutions at Broadcom, told CIO Dive earlier this month. “We are in no way saying it's been an easy path for our customers.”
Shenoy emphasized the advantages of a single platform private cloud strategy.
“You don't need to be your own system integrator,” he said. “We will create a single, unified product and a platform that you can run anywhere you want — in your data center or in a CSP or a hyperscaler — and we will make it extremely price competitive.”
Under Broadcom, VMware has pursued a product simplification strategy through bundling solutions and phasing out perpetual licenses in favor of a subscription-based pricing model. Previously, the company offered customers nearly 170 ways to purchase software and close to 9,000 SKUs, Shenoy said.
The shift was underway prior to the acquisition, according to Shenoy.
“It was a transition that VMware was always planning on doing,” he said. “Becoming part of Broadcom accelerated that transition, but it wasn’t what made that happen.”
VMware intends for the post-Broadcom solution to help customers unsilo storage and compute in order to reduce IT complexity and streamline operations, Turner said during the briefing.
“Our traditional legacy architecture is really not working in terms of being able to bring governance, control and agility to a cloud, because you've got different teams managing different environments,” he said. “It’s not very efficient.”
Some customers aren’t enjoying cost and efficiency gains just yet, according to Forrester. Many CIOs have seen VMware bills skyrocket “by as much as 500%” due to the new licensing and packaging model, the analyst firm said in a recent report.
Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan promised customers “greater profitability and improved market opportunities” in a March blog post. The company is now working to ease the transition for customers with the Jumpstart cloud maturity consulting program and free VCF training and certifications, all announced Tuesday.
