Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and his senior executives have come out fighting against the detractors of the company’s new licensing model for VMware software.
Since completing the acquisition of VMware at the end of last year, some customers and partners have slammed Broadcom for bundling products together – claiming users were being charged for software they didn’t need – and converting existing perpetual licenses to subscription licenses. Some customers have claimed pricing for their VMware software has doubled in price as a result.
But, at this week’s VMware Explore event in Barcelona, Tan was unrepentant after coming out on stage with a clenched fist [pictured] to address a packed keynote at VMware’s usual annual staging ground at the Barcelona Fira.
“What have we learnt [since the acquisition], we have learnt that some don’t want to pay for some of the great things that are part of our great products,” said Tan. “But, we are serious business people here, and we are not here to sell you bright shiny things, we are here to sell solutions that are going to improve your business.”
Tan then moved onto VMware’s big sales pitch this year, software to help companies run their data, apps and workloads on private clouds - as many come to realise that putting large chunks of these on public clouds run by the hyperscalers isn’t always cost effective. Tan said: “The future of the enterprise is private. Data centre silos slow innovation, which is a challenge we have to fix.”
He claims the provider’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is the platform for that fix, providing better resilience and security, and delivering cost savings over public clouds. He also talked about sovereignty. “The hyperscalers talk sovereignty, but often don’t deliver it in your own country. We are doing so and can give you clouds like public clouds, but on-premise and better with VCF.”
Broadcom defines private clouds as customer access to company data that can be reached from internal company infrastructure, their own dedicated data centres, rented out co-location spaces in shared data centres, or even data being run on on the servers located inside the hyperscalers’ data centres – but controlled by VCF, not the hyperscalers’ rival cloud and data management software. That’s pretty all-encompassing, but Tan reckons it’s a winning formula, as more organisations start to move back batches of workloads to privately run clouds in the face of increased costs.
Commenting further on the business changes that have often been criticised by some in the market, Tan added: “We are simplifying VMware. We have gone down from 8,000 SKUs [stock keeping units] to just four core offerings, and are investing a lot to make our products much easier to use.
“We are also enhancing our ecosystem for both our partners and customers. They are part of our community as the pendulum swings back to private cloud.”
In a neat definition, other execs from the stage stressed that “private cloud is not a place, it’s a platform”.
And to push the point home around licence changes, at a press and analysts presentation after the keynotes, Joe Baguley, chief technology officer, field sales, EMEA, Broadcom, cheekily said: “Don’t believe everything you read in the press.”
Echoing Baguley’s stance, that the numbers angered or out-of-pocket from the licencing changes, were overblown in the media, Luigi Freguia, president, EMEA sales, Broadcom, said: “Customers are getting good feedback from colleagues [in the industry] about the new platforms that are available, and customers are now willing to sign longer-term agreements that suit their purposes [under the new pricing and bundling regime].”
Freguia claimed: “Over the last 12 months, we have finalised agreements with 99% of our clients for our [new] product/service bundles.”
He admitted that for some customers, it was at first tricky to get their heads around the charging changes. But he maintained the offer of an alternative to the public cloud, and a streamlined product offer would “save money for customers”, overall.
Freguia added: “We are providing an alternative to the public cloud, allowing organisations to run their apps and workloads where they want. According to research [from Barclays], over 80% are considering repatriating data to a private cloud. With our software, they can do this in a common environment.”
More from VMware Explore in Barcelona to follow...
