- I’m surprised by the comments here.
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.
- ”Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom”
For any non Uk people, it’s the largest supermarket in Uk. Combination of large stores and smaller high street convenience stores.
(2nd largest was owned by Walmart who sold it recently to private equity and so now it’s saddled with debt and being ruined…).
- 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?
- If Tesco needs character witnesses that Broadcom has done this to many other customers, I think they’ll find plenty of willing participants.
Broadcom’s marketing for Proxmox is extremely effective.
by nubinetwork
6 subcomments
- > 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?
- Great time to migrate off VMware. All the migration paths are well-trodden by now, but goddamn 40k vm's. A lot of work ahead.
by Alien1Being
1 subcomments
- Spoke to a senior guy at a large national bank recently
who swore that they will never again get any Broadcom hardware.
He talked about "Broadcom lies.."
- What other reasonable choice exist for moving off VMWare for a small to medium size organization? Nutanix and Citrix is just as expensive, and another platform capture. ProxMox is not ready for Enterprise, even as it gains traction from hobbyists. I work with Splunk, and its price is approaching the point of being unaffordable for most organizations. The logging and observability market is consolidating toward BigCo and I'm afraid eventually there's not going to be any choice left, for small consumers and small players. The answer can't be "build your own" for every little adjacent tech you need to run a shop.
- I wonder if it's fair to say Tesco are experiencing being treated somewhat like they treat farmers!
by sscaryterry
0 subcomment
- 40k server workloads… what a good, objective, quantifiable unit of measure. I’m sure the author’s intent was to make it sound like 40k servers or virtual machines. Either way, those numbers would be insane. Sensationalist clickbait headline.
Could very well just have been that last stubborn server they just never got round to!
by Alien1Being
0 subcomment
- Broadcom shares are performing spectacularly well.
With the new $35 billion dollar AI / XPU deal, Broadcom is looking to ditch the legacy customers and move to the new shiny AI billions.
- When I was working at Tesco some 7 years ago, the goal was to move to AWS. Surprised they're still not even close.
Good on them for sticking it to Broadcom.
by whatever1
7 subcomments
- Why a retailer needs 40k servers? What are they serving? To whom?
What is wrong with system designers these days? Are they designing or just selling?
by firesteelrain
5 subcomments
- 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.
- They also at some point purchased Pivotal Cloud Foundry and increased the licensing costs by incredible (order of magnitude) amounts.
They are completely destroying their customer base for these products.
by driverdan
3 subcomments
- 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?
- Interesting -- none of the major VMWare customers had a second/alternative vendor/product? I hope they learnt the lesson.
by usernametaken29
1 subcomments
- 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.
by elevation
1 subcomments
- 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.
by GlacierFox
8 subcomments
- Why would you self sabotage such a considerable contract? Are Broadcom stupid?
- 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 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
- Good. Broadcom buying them was the death sentence for VMware. If it can't be reversed, the next best thing is to hasten it along. Nobody should be giving money to the likes of Broadcom.
- Imagine paying for virtualization software when open source options are almost industry standard
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by Nikhil37475
0 subcomment
- effective
by Nikhil37475
0 subcomment
- extremely effective
- this is probably another big risk with enterprises going all in on using spring-boot.
migrating to quarkus won't save you either - since it's IBM on the other hand.
if only other ecosystems could catch up to Java/JVM solutions.
- 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.
[0] https://github.com/warehouse-pg/warehouse-pg
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