News

As VMware Competitors Circle, Broadcom Makes New Partners

• By David Ramel
• 06/11/2024

VMware competitors have been quick to position themselves as alternatives amid the licensing/pricing upheaval following its acquisition by Broadcom, but the latter company has been busy fighting back with distribution deals of its own.

Broadcom came under heavy fire for killing perpetual licenses in favor of subscriptions late last year after buying VMware, which led competitors like CloudBolt to helpfully offer up its own products as alternatives by publishing a "VM Ware Acquisition Aftermath" whitepaper recently.

Broadcom has been making cloud moves, too, recently ending authorization to resell VMware Cloud on AWS while strengthening VMware/Azure cloud ties (see article, "After AWS Licensing Tiff, Broadcom Strengthens VMware/Azure Cloud Ties").

The AWS move prompted IBM to today publish "Approaches to migrating your VMware workloads to AWS," wherein it helpfully offers up its IBM Migration Factory to exit AWS as one option.

Also just today, Virtuozzo and Robson Communications announced a new distribution agreement "to offer on-premises or hosted cloud alternatives and enable business continuity for companies impacted by Broadcom's acquisition of VMware."

Value-Added OEM Solutions with Dell, HPE and Lenovo
But, as noted, Broadcom isn't just standing idly by in the face of these affronts, yesterday announcing "The Next Evolution of Broadcom Value-Added OEM Solutions, which entails agreements with Value-Add OEM (VAO) partners Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo to deliver VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) solutions, with more partnerships to come.

The idea is to more easily disseminate customized turnkey solutions to help with customer digital transformations, specifically the on-premises cloud experience.

"Our goal is to deliver VCF through a rich portfolio of co-engineered offerings with our VAO partners," Broadcom said. "Our mutual customers will enjoy a seamless experience through tight integration of VCF with the VAO partner differentiated technologies and services to enable full stack deployment, operations, management, orchestration, monitoring, diagnostics, support, and life cycle management, all delivered by a single vendor." Broadcom said the VAO partner solutions are:

• Workload ready: Turnkey, out-of-the-box cloud experience.
• Easy to manage: Through deployment, activation, and life cycle management.
• Resilient and secure: Pre-tested, validated, and certified for strict service-level agreements.

Company president and CEO Hock Tan described the company's various distribution efforts in another article just published, today, this one titled "The forward-looking customer journey continues."

He listed routes to market as:

• The Direct Route: For our largest customers who have the skills and the scale to deploy their own private clouds on-prem, Broadcom has dedicated teams of people with the necessary skills to support these customers directly.
• The Channel Route: There are many customers who can utilize relationships with their own value-added resellers and partners, or we can engage with these customers through our resellers on equivalent terms and conditions. Either way, the channel is open.
• The Managed Service Provider Route: For customers who choose to not run their infrastructure on prem but prefer to consume a private cloud as a service, we have set up a network of managed service providers globally who can run customer workloads on VCF.

"When we acquired VMware last November, we sought to conclude one journey -- simplifying VMware;s Go-to-Market approach and modernizing the focus of its product offerings," he said. "Going forward, our goal is to enable our customers and partners to be laser-focused on deploying the best and most innovative virtual self-service private cloud solution in the market."