The Broadcom business model (outside the chip business) had been pretty well known, and they don’t really hide it.
They are tech bottom feeders. They find large businesses with a decent moat and free cash flow but are in long term decline (and wasting cash trying to find something new). They buy them, cut development, support and marginal products. Raise prices and squeeze as much as they can.
It’s the same modus operandi as private equity but worse, because Broadcom has the money and technical resources to do interesting things with the technology, but they don’t.
Broadcom is publicly listed with a public float of about 98% (i.e. 98% of it's shares are listed publicly).
You're right that most shares are held by institutions (~80%), but that typically reflects the fact that most share ownership by individuals/companies goes through intermediaries (401k, fund investments, ETF etc.). Most of this institutional ownership is just asset managers, insurance, banks etc. taking their cut before passing returns/loses through to the end risk holder. The average institutional ownership of companies in the S&P500 for example is also ~80%.
None of this takes away from the point that Broadcom is absolutely run like a PE firm as the original commenter noted.
Not surprising given the CEO was appointed by KKR/Silverlake 20 years ago.
In really grinds my gears that the buying companies take out the debt to take over against the companies themselves.
So many well-known UK companies have been sunk by debt interest on loans taken out to acquire said companies.
By all means use the companies to secure loans, but the liability should be on the books of the parent companies not the companies being acquired!
There have even been cases where the companies have been effectively asset-stripped by "sell and lease back" of property, leaving the companies a shell of their former selves with no meaningful assets, so as soon as there are any unexpected headwinds they collapse.
And it has no US comparison. The tesco meal deal concept, the literal wall of choices, just doesnt exist in north america.
I did a big work trip to the UK a couple years back with over 100 people. I tried to explain meal deals and nobody believed me. Then our people basically stripped the meal deal shelves of the tesco express beside our hotel.
Meal deals are in every supermarket in the UK. Petrol stations even do them.
Also, as a foreigner who lives over there, I think they are... sad? I'm surprised they got a positive reception from your coworkers. For me they are a backup and a failure to do something more interesting.
What people don't realise is the startups here in the UK run on miserable sandwiches, tasteless crisps and energy drinks. Middle management lives on slightly more expensive platters from Pret.
Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere theres zero reason to be subjecting yourself to a supermarket meal deal, we've got an overabundance of independent food places in towns in the uk.
This is one of those things that varies by cultural cachet rather than actual quality. It's not that different from people living off Japanese konbini, but those are perceived as much cooler.
Most cities will have local sandwich options as well near major office districts, but they might not be as cheap.
Garment section is also amazing, british ppl are so classy while having timeless thick pieces
I ended up flying back home with some oxford shirt from the Tesco, and it's really cool (vneck pull over - tie - shirt sets were sold out with my size unfortunately)
A sandwich, bag of crisps and a drink for £5 is an actual deal. Sandwich alone in U.S. would be $10 and the “$15 Meal Deal” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
There's a lot to complain about in the UK, but food price/quality is actually pretty good. Not the absolute best, but far from the worst and certainly not Scandinavian prices.
Gosh, it used to be £3 not that long ago. About £5 for a wrap at Prêt if I couldn't be bothered to go fight with the tourists to cross the road down Kingsway.
Incorrect. Maybe you familiar with the high cost of living areas. There are similar $5 deals in the United States. The US is a big place and has many, many businesses offering very similar deals.
Meal deal prices are higher in certain places, like motorway service stations. If there's a captive market, they'll sneak the price up just like every other company. If there's competition they'll use lower pricing.
Mmh, you can get 3 el cheapo sandwiches for 1.99€, a 100g bag of chips for 0.99€ and a liter of water for 0.90€ or flavoured /coke for 1.99€ in Germany
Considering a £ is more then a €, supposedly at last - it doesn't sound like a good deal to me
If you want a shitty sandwich you can find it for $5 in the US no problem. Plus some variation of the sausage roll that will clean you out just as well.
The "main" has expanded to Huel, salads, wraps, sushi, even hot food
The "snack" can be more than crisps: small bags of fresh chicken, 2 boiled eggs, small sushi pack, gyozas etc
The "drink" includes quality smoothies, acceptable vending machine coffee etc
Meal deal value maximizing is the whole game lol. There are also lots of healthier options if you choose carefully
In certain Sainsbury's you can get hot food as the main such as a small green curry or chicken goujons, and wedges or hash browns as the side
But the price creeps up £0.50 practically yearly. I think it's £5.50 already in Sainsbury's
It's better to view it as a cheaper alternative to eating at a restaurant rather than somehow saving money compared to bringing in leftovers. People who think £5.50 a day for lunch is saving money versus cooking themselves are delusional
I worked in software acquisitions for a large organization and it was really eye opening to see how insane some of these companies are when it comes to pricing customers out. I always wondered - what is the motive? They make pricing structure changes that aren't even considerable for any organization that has any fashion of a budget. VMWare was one example where our already insane costs that had nearly tripled over the previous 4 years were quoted to triple at the end of the period.
Another was a Java SE licensing change that went from around $1k per instance, of which we had about 5. Mind you there is little to no maintenance support provided here. The increase was to $5.25 per organizational employee per instance, whether they used the instance or not - of which we had 100k. The choice was obviously a simple one.
I can only assume very few organization stay on the ride for those kinds of changes, but obviously they must - but why?
It might take a large org several years to migrate off core systems like VMWare. If you think the customer is likely to churn within a few years anyway it makes economic sense to hike their fee.
At any one time, something like 90% of all enterprises are engaged in at least one multi-year strategic move away from an abusive vendor. In the tech world, these might be Oracle, Broadcom, (formerly) IBM, or (even more formerly) Computer Associates.
Typically you're looking at a year or two of discovery, audits and planning, another year or two to cover the main transition, and then up to five years of mopping up.
There are other near-ubiquitous vendors (eg. Microsoft and Cisco) who manage to be tolerated as annoying rather than outright abusive. I guess they take a slightly different view of how hard to squeeze their customers.
It's hard (=expensive) to change all the internal infrastructure or sometimes even internal processes, and if companies manage to stay just a bit cheaper than their custumers cost to rewrite "everything", they'll get the money. Even if some customers do so, with the price hike, they still earn more from the ones who don't.
Having done this to a number of clusters, it works really well; TLDR you can have it as simple as mounting the remote ESXi as a datastore and just migrating it straight over in the UI. Or automate it if you have 40,000 of them as Tesco does, though tbqh I'm not sure Proxmox is the solution for that scale of workload.
Our MSP refuses to consider ProxMox because “we need to support it”… but are happy as clams to throw me outrageous HyperV labor costs.
They’re literally putting me in a position where I either need to fire them because they refuse to use an open source solution and hire people that can read code… or fire them because they want 50,000 to move 15 VMs over to HyperV.
I want an MSP that isn’t scared of things outside of Microsoft.
It's honestly been easy as hell to support and upstream support contracts are available for cheap as chips, like a grand a socket a year or less. An MSP could partner with them to offer enhanced support if they were smart! It's just KVM / Qemu / Ceph on Linux, plenty of 3rd parties can provide support for it... just go spin up a cluster in a trio of VMware machines with nested virtualization turned on and take it for a spin.
You can get court transcripts but (just like the USA) you have to pay for them. Things could be improved, but in no way are normal UK court cases secret as you claimed. You can also visit the courts and watch cases from the public gallery. You're basically wrong and doubling down on it, for what reason I cannot say.
My friend, please don’t act like an expert when you happen to be talking to one…
Magistrates court trials are not recorded so no transcripts. So a malicious prosecution is easy to pursue.
When one files for a transcript in courts that are recorded, the transcript is first sent to the Judge and the judge is allowed to change anything they like, with no transparency. They can also refuse a transcript if they feel like it.
I’m not going to respond any further to you as you for some unknown reason are talking about things that you do not understand…
Mags courts are for petty offences, nothing like this. Contract law and Torts will be heard at the High Court, and transcripts are available via EX107.
The only exceptions are when the judge imposes reporting restrictions or anonymisation (unlikely in a non-criminal case as it's meant to protect the identities of complainants or sensitive witnesses) or for ex parte actions (which are very limited, eg. to cover an emergency injunction to prevent imminent destruction of evidence).
> Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses.
What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?
I'm having flashbacks from the late 90s/ early 00s when your company would hire a "Linux guy" that would force a large scale migration to some open source stack no one heard of, then only later worry about if any existing applications worked.
Currently in Finland, a major public health provider is moving to chromebooks. By the end of 2026. They won’t even have the test environments ready before Q3 2026.
I'd would assume that this is not a monolithic cluster of 40k vm's but at least tens of clusters. Which puts it in the realm of capabilities of Proxmox.
Before my vacation we (3 colleagues and myself) completedan 8 months long migration (coordination with stakeholders is longer and more complex than migrating a 192TB VM !!!) to 6 proxmox clusters so 20 to 40 clusters for 40k is certainly possible but imo it would be unwieldy.
I work at Red Hat and a customer moving 40k servers off VMware is a fairly regular occurrence. It'd be one of the larger migrations but certainly not unusual. We can usually do about 500-1000 guests per day once the migration is fully underway after the initial engagement and a qualification period where the VMs get scoped for anything unusual / difficult to move.
It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization.
There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time).
[I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.]
>Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.
I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US Government entities who are not even considering it at this time.
If you look deeper into the migration article, it's pointed out that they are already facing migration challenges. I wouldn't be shocked if 3 years later, there are some workloads still running on VMware, you can't easily get them off and just renews insane licensing cost for much smaller hardware footprint.
The extortionate renewal rates I saw as a gift from Broadcom. It made it very easy to price the risk of doing nothing and be sure that the cost of outages during and immediately post-migration would be lower. (Yes, we had a few, due to obscure drivers issues or an app that really wanted a specific CPU or chipset or virtual NIC, and they cost us less than 10%, probably closer to 5%, of what the proposed renewal would have cost.)
Yeah I'm at a place that is kind of sucking it up, but there is a work-stream to move more stuff into the cloud and another work-stream to move more stuff on-prem but Kubernetes running on bare-metal. There's also work to stop using some component of VMware as well.
I think Broadcom correctly realizes that no matter what they do there is no long term: In a world of Cloud hyperscalers and containerization, the absolute number of “traditional” virtual machines run by a commercial hypervisor has nowhere to go but down.
No one's going away from VMs any time soon (if ever). More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.
Best of luck. Without revealing any commercially sensitive information it would be fun to know what the age of the oldest VM running is. Windows 2K? RHEL 4?
(As an end-user sort of person, I get a strong smell of Bladerunner from this kind of thing, where you can see old PCs in the background on top of decks with cables running out of them).
Containers do not reduce reliance on VMs, really. Those containers still need a server to run on, and that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal.
> that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal
I understand that this is normal but I've never understood it.
If all the containers are running the same company's applications (so they don't care about security boundaries between them), what's the difference between having all the containers under the same kernel vs separate kernels?
The VM layer gives you an aspect of fungibility that commodity hardware doesn’t. It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.
Note: if you want to conflate “containers“ with an entire job management and scheduling system (“k8s”) then you’re not actually talking about the current target customer for VMware.
Openshift Virt is fully open source under a BSD license, so you now have legal options to move to a competitor or even manage it yourself (although I wouldn't recommend the latter, even I don't manage OSV myself).
> Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.
If one believes that they intend to get new VMware customers, or that they intend to have more than single-digit numbers of customers on VMware ten years from now, I can see how that might make their strategy baffling.
They appear to have made a lot of money doing what they're doing, so it looks to be working quite well for them... regardless of what the public or their former customers think about it.
Lots of orgs have been documenting their moves to KubeVirt over the past year or so. There's KubeCon video recordings on the youtube channel from Amsterdam with lots of this kind of stuff, especially from european end users.
One thing I find consistent is orgs are also looking at the whole stack, this is just another major component of digital sovereignty.
Disclaimer: work for CNCF on this but worked on the first version of VMWare Tanzu so every announcement in this space is interesting lol.
Not just farmers, they are somewhat abusive towards their customers as well. It's been good watching Aldi/Lidl enter the market and put pressure on them.
Online ordering. Backend logistics (like icebergs, most of a supermarket is invisible). Stocktaking. Financials. They've probably got several role-isolated servers per store, each with a backup.
Lots of these machines are dynamically created and provisioned depending on load factors nowadays.
The days of manually setting up servers in hyperscaling-environments are long long gone.
Example: Your GitLab CICD needs Runners. They are dynamically requested "somewhere in our cloud somwhere in the world" and then spun up and configures fully automatically. No human touches this stuff anymore.
Is it that hard to imagine? They do 100B USD / yr revenue as a supermarket chain with 330k employees and a massive logistics operation. The software supporting the whole shebang is not gonna run on a spare macbook pro in a cupboard.
How do you imagine cash registers work these days? With 5,000 stores worldwide, 40k servers is 8 computers per store, which doesn't seem excessive to me.
5000 stores, let's say 10 checkout lines per store, just to overprovision, so at worst 50000 simultaneous transactions going on, but probably way less. You can do that with a single server, but you'd want some redundancy and spare capacity.
I worked with a Danish retailer with +3000 store in ~50 countries, and even adding their webshop on top and they were closer to 200 (maybe 300) servers (most VMs). Then you need the ActiveDirectory, office IT, all that stuff, with redundancy and it adds up quickly... but not to 40K.
What I will say that people forget is that production might be 8 beefy VMs, you still need to replicate that to a number of test systems, staging environments and so on. So a 8 node production cluster because maybe 24 servers when accounting those other environments.
I'd assume most of the big supermarkets have a 4-5 host cluster with the small local stores having a 2-3 host cluster. You've got the software to run the tills sure, but also the loyalty card system (which seems to have a local cache at each site based on how quickly it returns your first name), VoIP, Door Access systems, BMS, Digital Signage, Scan as you shop systems, CCTV, Stock management systems..
I imagine that cash registers have the cpu power of at least a cellphone and that they can store transactions over internet in the central company database.
I don’t know how anyone can afford these migrations especially for production on prem workloads without building literally duplicate sets of hardware clusters then manually migrate workloads.
We usually reuse the VMware hardware and (most importantly) file storage. Some additional hardware is required temporarily so you can build out initial Openshift nodes. The VMware nodes are decommissioned and converted to OSV nodes as the conversion goes along. With some kinds of file storage (cough NetApp) the conversion is zero copy, the VM literally stays where it is. With others we will copy to new NFS storage areas which will be provisioned on the same physical hardware.
The 40k servers are probably made up of multiple redundant vSphere clusters with failover. You simply take one of those redundant clusters and migrate one half of it over. Then the other half. Then duplicate that process. As you build more compute in the new stack, you can decomission more and more of the old stack and convert it. The transition would progress like a cascade, with larger and larger groups of clusters being migrated at once until you're left with the one-off, ad-hoc, weirdo clusters at the end that need to be manually migrated (usually with great effort).
The actual hardware servers are clustered together into pools of resources. The pools are where the VMs live. The bigger the new pool becomes, the faster you can empty the old one. So the migration starts very slowly, ramps up quickly, and then tapers off.
> You simply take one of those redundant clusters and migrate one half of it over.
For that half you are migrating, you are essentially operating without redundancy. If these are serious production workloads, the tradeoff is not as simple as you make it seem.
Ha I have done migrations recently from vSphere to vSphere using vMotion and it was easy.
But it still took duplicate set of HW and I couldn’t imagine doing it without a lot of IaC and automation in place (plus physical space, power and cooling)
As someone who has never dealt with anything close to this scale, why would it take 18 months to migrate? Is this poor config management, a lack of automation, or something else?
I work in automating conversions off VMware and 40,000 VMs is just a lot of data to move. We could probably do 500-1000 / day which would be 3 months, but that would be best case, and there's a lot of prequalification where you examine classes of VMs to check what software they're running and identify the unsupported / difficult cases. That planning would add extra months.
In some cases you can do zero copy conversions, so downtime can be done in a few minutes, but it relies on the customer have very particular storage configurations (NetApp basically). In other cases there can be significant downtime that needs to be scheduled. I worked one case where the customer shut down several production lines over a number of weekends so we could convert the workloads. (Everything was meticulously planned, along with fallbacks that thankfully we did not need to use.)
Some things you don't convert at all. Databases generally get replicated at DB level to new hardware. Single-purpose appliances need to be reprovisioned by going back to the vendor and asking for a KVM equivalent.
Then there's all kinds of craziness, like we had customers who rolled their own backup solutions where we had to add special cases to the software to detect and ignore the backup partitions. Or people running Windows 95 or RHEL 3 (for real!) where there are no virtio drivers and we don't certify the hypervisor so it requires support exceptions. At this point people have been using VMware for nearly 30 years, there's all kinds of crazy legacy.
VMWare is like Active Directory: been around for ages, wildly flexible, and has a habit of seeping structural debt into every line of business the organization undertakes.
The ecosystem existed - Red Hat OVE, Nutanix were mature in the enterprise market, but VMware had such a grip with low cost (honestly, it was a smart Broadcom play despite infuriating customers), ease of use, feature rich, big software/support/consultant ecosystem. It was almost like the Windows of virtualization, in that it bred complacency.
I know nothing about Tesco, but sometimes ops cultures lack the skills or mandate to successfully switch tech stacks.
My hope from this headline was that some open source solution was functionally equivalent from a business perspective. But then I read that Tesco has had to:
> procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality
meaning VMWare is still basically the only option if you need something that works out of the box. Hopefully this changes in the mid term as other customers migrate away.
The competition is compelling, actually. Red Hat OVE, Nutanix for those who want support, and Proxmox is emerging as a possibility in the ent space.
I read "reduced functionality" as they married themselves to something specific and non-portable, like oh, pick a card from VMware - NSX networking, VSAN storage, maybe something in Tanzu, and that phrase reflected their difficulty escaping the lock-in quickly enough. (This was all speculation)
At that scale it is almost always easier to run your own infrastructure. Like, I’m not kidding, kubernetes will handle it fairly easy. Get a DevOps engineer or a good consulting agency and run your cluster on Hetzner. This saved us insane amounts of money. No need to buy infrastructure outright but simply moving off the cloud will easily squash your bill by 50% if not more.
It's incredible how hard it is for firms to migrate away from platforms. Clearly you could just give something away for nearly free for 20 years and then jack the price up and make bajillions.
Even better if you can charge a mildly high license fee for 20 years first and then jack it up to something outrageous and still have customers who just can't drop you.
I think it's a cultural thing over there. They came loaded for bear with their customers to convert them to the new ARR-based, non-perpetual product lineup.
I've negotiated a lot of contracts and renewals. I've been threatened twice - Oracle, and then Broadcom. We had perpetual licenses, but that didn't matter, according to them we were out of compliance and as a "courtesy" they delayed sending C&D as a precursor to suing us - this was the intro meeting call. There was no budging on price, and they actually priced the cheaper alternative we could have considered ("VVF") at like a 0.1% discount from their core "VCF" product, I think as a fuck-you. It was a great time, our reseller and I shared a drink over that one.
It does seem an odd move. No doubt they're going to milk existing customers for everything they're worth, but they're going to create a generation of people who will never buy anything from them ever again. That guy who's busting his balls to migrate off VMWare because of the price hike is gonna be the CTO in 10 years time, and when he's making that 10m USD purchasing decision they're gonna stay well away from anything with the name Broadcom on it.
I dont think that's true, a lot of the database market that exists is basically "we're not oracle but we did a thing they can also do for much cheaper"
Broadcom expects every customer to move off VMware eventually due to technology shifts, by jacking up the price 10x and cutting costs 70% they can print money for a few years from customers that are either too risk-averse or too dysfunctional to switch to another product.
Possibly they’ll do enough brand damage that it turns out to be a negative ROI, but for now they’re printing money.
i just had to spend a bunch of time (not for work, for hobby purposes) bc broadcom acquired bitnami or something and then decided to kill off the free docker images for various software. very very annoying. can't believe they did this by just yanking the images from the registry too, leaving nodes to fail if they lose their image cache and have to restart
Before AI, the cloud was the big thing. It took years for companies to understand the risk of hosting on someone else’s infrastructure, regardless of the initial cost savings. I’m somewhat happy to see reality sink in, though this specific case is quite alarming.
If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.
If anyone here is looking to move Greenplum workloads off Broadcom (or unsupported open source), email me miles.richardson@enterprisedb.com — I’m the PM for WarehousePG [0], an open source fork of Greenplum. We’ve got a cracked engineering team working hard to modernize it.
At EDB we’ve forked Greenplum from last OSS into WarehousePG, added over a dozen customers with petabytes of data, and hired a few dozen specialists. We have an extension for Lakehouse connectivity based on DataFusion (with optional offload to Spark including GPU acceleration) to read/write Iceberg. And we have a lot planned for the next version, which you might infer from the name: WarehousePG 19.
The Broadcom business model (outside the chip business) had been pretty well known, and they don’t really hide it.
They are tech bottom feeders. They find large businesses with a decent moat and free cash flow but are in long term decline (and wasting cash trying to find something new). They buy them, cut development, support and marginal products. Raise prices and squeeze as much as they can.
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