They're not the only ones pissed off with VMWare [1].
What I don't understand is what prevents them to shop around for alternatives. What is VMWare's very good moat that prevents the competition from invading their castle?
20 years ago anyone and everyone had datacenters full of VMware. Now most of it is stuff that a company hasn't bothered to move to cloud yet. There's a few things it's still the best choice for but those are niche things. Like stuff that absolutely needs to be self hosted for privacy or security. The time of VMware being the default is long gone.
Moving from a mainstream to a niche product means a market that's shrinking. No growth potential. No potential for new competitors to start up. Proxmox is good but it's not exactly enterprise.
This is why Broadcom bought it and sucks the most value out of it before it completely disappears.
> There's a few things it's still the best choice for but those are niche things.
That just isn't true. The reality is that being in the cloud is not beneficial for most businesses. They do it because it's trendy, not because it's the best solution. In recent years we've seen more and more recognition of that fact, and it has driven people to host stuff on prem.
2. Tesco had a good deal they paid for ahead of time, with the full support cycle detailed in the contract that Broadcom is refusing to honor.
3. Broadcom is arguing that since Tesco is migrating off, they can't sue for damages. Tesco would probably counter argue that the migration is due to Broadcom not honoring the original contract.
because there are no real alternatives. Everything that could be considered an alternative has drawbacks or things that are missing. Proxmox comes close but doesn't offer proper enterprise support contracts, so you'd be stuck with a 3rd party.
Then there's training. you can't easily switch your admins and service desk techs to a different product. That alone takes months, of not years, and costs a lot. Rewrite all processes, etc.
Then there's 3rd party integration. Since VMware was basically the "default", most 3rd party products offered turnkey integration into VMware, and VMware only. Think backup applications or security etc. You don't switch backup vendors easily (for the same reasons - training, features, ...) and if you do consider it, it adds to the cost
This is why, for many companies that don't have 50-100 people or more in their IT department, it's more expensive to switch away from VMware so they grudgingly pay, while trying to move as much workload away from it as possible.
20 years ago anyone and everyone had datacenters full of VMware. Now most of it is stuff that a company hasn't bothered to move to cloud yet. There's a few things it's still the best choice for but those are niche things. Like stuff that absolutely needs to be self hosted for privacy or security. The time of VMware being the default is long gone.
Moving from a mainstream to a niche product means a market that's shrinking. No growth potential. No potential for new competitors to start up. Proxmox is good but it's not exactly enterprise.
This is why Broadcom bought it and sucks the most value out of it before it completely disappears.