VMware is going to be officially acquired by Broadcom in a few days (October 30th, if everything goes smooth) and everyone is wondering that that truly means for their customers, partners and employees. Lot of speculation has been floating around for the past year, but nobody truly knows what to expect. Are they going to focus their energy on the F500 customers like they have done with other acquisitions in the past? Or will they continue to embrace the customer centric approach that VMware currently has today? Is the VMware culture going to remain untouched? Is the company going to continue to embrace EPIC2 values? What about the EPIC2 days off (quarterly company wide days off to focus on their wellbeing)?
I do not know is the real answer, and I personally do not have any insight information about what is about to happen, but below are some personal predictions:
** All predictions below are my own personal opinion, not my employer and they are all completely speculative **
- Some internal re-structuring is guaranteed, which unfortunately means some people will lose their jobs
- Most IT companies have had layoffs in the past couple of years, and VMware is one of the few that have not
- There will be many jobs that will be redundant since Broadcom already has several departments in place
- SKU reduction will probably be another subject that Broadcom will probably tackle immediately
- With SKU optimization in mind, I would expect less options/bundles available per product
- Ex: vSAN has ROBO (Std, Adv, Ent), Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus, vSAN+
- It gets confusing for the customer to select the right one, even with proper technical guidance
- Sometimes they want to see quotes with pricing for all of them to compare costs
- Research and Development budget will most likely be reduced (hopefully not by a great margin)
- Some products that are not profitable may end up being slowly retired, or barely supported
- Price increases will be guaranteed. If I was to bet on these predictions, this is the one I would pick as my front runner
- Perpetual licensing will continue to be phased out over time, hopefully not immediately after acquisition
- VMUG support/budget may start to decline year over year till they completely defund the program
- VMware Explore conference should not be immediately affected, but may start to fade away over time
- Tech support costs will be reduced, therefore customer experienced will be affected when trying to get issues resolved
** All predictions below are my own personal opinion, not my employer and they are all completely speculative **
Most of my career was built on VMware products, and I truly hope that most of my predictions are wrong. I would love to see this company that I always looked up to, continue innovating and providing great products like they always have so far.
