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…).
Broadcom’s marketing for Proxmox is extremely effective.
Unlike USA, we don’t have Juries for corporate cases and generally filings are private so the Judgement can say pretty much anything….
That's horrific
> 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.
What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?
Interesting times.
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.]
Edit: Almost forgot that I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about it: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/
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.
Also, Broadcom has slashed expenses so I wouldn't be shocked if profit margins are crazy. This article: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/03/07/bulk-of-big-... indicates over 1 Billion additional revenue per quarter
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.
What about the long term? Who care, massive money made and they can use that to keep going.
It’s not growing in any meaningful way relative to other technology businesses.
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.
Don't think about how hard it is to migrate a VM to a new provider. Think about how hard it is to:
* Get procurement to sign off on a new vendor
* Guarantee that your ISO compliance standards can be met under the new regime
* Make sure that GDPR requirements are met during any data transfer process to the satisfaction of your legal team
* Get the old infrastructure team and the new infrastructure team coordinated enough to be able to plan a migration without downtime
* Mollify the consultants that the CEO's friend said he should hire
* Analyse the migration plan to death to derisk it while at the same time be unable to actually evaluate it small scale due to the points above
>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"
Who needs paying customers when you have AI?
Possibly they’ll do enough brand damage that it turns out to be a negative ROI, but for now they’re printing money.
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.
any attempt at milking spring-boot will lead to forking it into OpenBoot or something
If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.
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.