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Broadcom has cut many jobs at VMware, terminated products and canceled a number of reseller partnerships
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The vendor also canceled partnerships and terminated products with no notice, Michael Leonard, former VMware employee, told Silverlinings
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Prashanth Shenoy, in Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation division, admitted to another publication that the the company could have done a "better job communicating"
Broadcom is doing damage control about VMware.
Since the chip designer completed its $61 billion acquisition of the cloud software provider at the end of last year, it has cut many jobs at VMware, terminated products and canceled a number of reseller partnerships. Now Broadcom, which isn’t generally a company that has much to say to the press, has started a charm offensive on VMware.
Broadcom has recently published many blogs and talked to the trade press about the changes at VMware.
Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of cloud platform, infrastructure, and solutions marketing for Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) division told DataCenter Knowledge that the acquisition is a “humongous change, and that has absolutely caused confusion in the market. We could have done a better job communicating.”
Shenoy pushed business simplification and ecosystem simplification in a recent company blog. “We’ve completed our transition from selling perpetual software to subscription licensing only; streamlined what, how, and through whom we will sell our software going forward; and reorganized internally around our VMware Cloud Foundation strategy to streamline execution,” he said.
“We understand this massive transformation and simplification of the portfolio and our business model has raised many questions and concerns as you continue to evaluate how to maximize value from your VMware software investments,” he wrote, addressing its customers.
Commentators on LinkedIn, Reddit and other forums, however, are still blindsided by the changes at VMware under Broadcom. Michael Leonard, former VMware employee, noted that Broadcom canceled partnerships and terminated products with no notice.
“They created bundles that force purchases of unwanted components,” he told us. “They switched from per CPU to per Core pricing for virtual machines (VMs).”
Leonard said that this change in the pricing structure was particularly egregious. “After they went from pricing on CPUs to cores, they claimed that they had lowered prices,” he noted. “Even if they lowered the per-core price the total price is much higher as most products were priced on CPU regardless of the number of cores.”
Unsurprisingly, the former staffer is cynical about Broadcom’s actions regarding VMware. Leonard said that the company is claiming to have streamlined and simplified the VMware product line, while having a better partnership program.
“It's fine, even necessary, to do these things, to a degree,” he said. “The problem is how Broadcom executed, and the lengths to which they went...other companies transition gracefully, but not Broadcom.”