“Don’t believe the hype”: Broadcom claims it’s been able to solve most of its customer issues following VMware acquisition

Customers shouldn’t believe the negative reports about VMware following its acquisition by Broadcom, the latter’s EMEA CTO Joe Baguley told ITPro.

While there’s been a lot of noise in the press around the results of the acquisition, Baguley said his response has been to ask customers whether they’ve spoken to the firm directly.

“Then you have that conversation, and it all works out fine. You know, 99.9% of the time, it works out fine,” Baguley said.

This comes after a year in which Broadcom has changed its licensing structure, created fears around higher prices, and slashed numerous products within the VMware environment.

Baguley said that explaining the licensing change to customers has been a keen focus for the firm, as customers have often been viewing updated prices without considering the entire context of the change.

“The numbers people were looking at looked wrong because they were in different contexts,” Baguley said.

He said that rather than customers just buying cores and then paying for support, the new subscription-based pricing model means people are being charged annually rather than paying an upfront cost.

This means the annual subscription cost could appear higher compared with annual support costs, he said, but that doesn’t necessarily account for the dropped upfront cost.

“That’s the conversation you go through with customers, and they’re like, ‘oh no, so you’re not doubling my prices.’ Well no, though, on the face value, it looks like that,” Baguley said.

“Obviously it’s more complicated than that, I’m really simplifying the example here, but in essence, that’s what we’re talking about, is how people sort of get through that,” he added.

Key to Broadcom’s strategy with customers has been reminding them of the value VMware offers, Baguley said, as under the new subscription pricing model customers gain access to the entirety of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

“It’s talking about the value of what they’re now eligible for in the new product offering,” Baguley said.

A tumultuous year

Despite Baguley’s positive outlook, the past year under Broadcom has been a trying time for VMware. The EMEA CTO said the firm has had positive interactions with customers, but at least some have raised concerns.

Research from UK cloud firm Civo claimed that over half (51.5%) of VMware customers were considering ditching VMware services. 48.7% said they were actively exploring alternative cloud providers.

Analyst firm Gartner made a similar assessment, predicting an increased level of ‘devirtualization’ – moving workloads off virtualized platforms – related to increased costs at VMware after the acquisition.

Cloud storage firm Pure Storage even rolled out a new virtual machine (VM) assessment tool specifically designed to assist customers in navigating changing costs at VMware.