At this week’s VMware Explore customer and partner conference in Las Vegas, VMware did its best to address the elephant in the room in front of thousands of attendees – that is the impending acquisition of the company by Broadcom.
The acquisition is seemingly inching towards completion with an end of October target date, and regulators in the European Union and the UK have cleared it. But the company is still waiting on US and China regulators to get the green light.
This position means the company is in a tricky situation when it comes to answering questions about future strategy, operations, headcounts going forward, and partner relationships, for instance. At VMware Explore it advised both journalists and analysts to search for definitive answers on such issues from Broadcom direct, who isn’t saying much more than what it was saying last year, when the deal was first announced.
But, in Las Vegas, the product and service announcements kept coming, showing that VMware is not being stalled on the development and marketing front, and Broadcom’s CEO was in the keynotes audience on the first day to see for himself what he is getting for his money.
VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram (pictured) told attendees: “Hock [Hock E Tan – Broadcom CEO] is even more excited [about the acquisition] than he was last May.”
For his part, while he was in the crowd, Tan’s own short recorded address was pumped out to the audience, which didn’t say anything new. Once the transaction completes, he said, Broadcom intended to continue to invest in VMware products and services, and would be splashing out billions of dollars in the process, including on expanding the company’s ecosystem.
But, in response, one European attendee sat behind me, responded loudly to his colleague: “But what about the partners”. There is concern among some VMware partners that the deal will somehow not be good for them, and it’s probably fair to say that comes down to a fear that VMware’s open business culture will maybe be affected in some way, or that any potential rejig of channel benefits and margins will mean less for them.
Broadcom as a company certainly doesn’t go out of its way to say much publicly outside of acquisition talk. By the time we get to VMware Explore in Barcelona this November, we might have some more definitive answers.
More on VMware Explore Las Vegas to follow.
