Fear of the unknown keeps Broadcom's VMware herd captive. Don't be cowed
Prisoners of ware can’t escape by looking at each other. Form a committee, soldiers
Opinion With Broadcom putting the bite on VMware customers with more abandon than Dracula in a blood bank, one has to wonder. Why hang around? Why better bled than fled?
Plenty of other enterprise-class VM options are available. Is it Stockholm syndrome? Has Broadcom given the head of marketing job to the Hypnotoad? Is it that clause in the contract which says "Open your wallet and repeat after me: help yourself?" Not a bit of it, says tech analyst Gartner, in a report on VMware's institutional stickiness, sending one of its VP analysts to explain it further.
Everyone is asking what everyone else is doing, he says, which is the Gartner motto, vision statement, and core line of business – all in eight words. It follows this up with the insight that new owner Broadcom isn't really selling virtualization with VMware. Rather, it is a network, storage and management tool vendor, with VMs at the bottom of the value stack.
The result? You can't think of migrating until you spend a lot of person-months scoping out what you're actually using, because you just don't know now your network, storage and management tools are set up otherwise. This may come as a bit of a surprise to those who have to regularly renegotiate licensing with Broadcom, a process normally involving knowing what you're paying for and why. That thing called Return On Investment. Efficient infrastructure support for your business, avoiding nasty software audit surprises, little things like these.
Hear the man out, though. Once you've worked out what you've been paying for all these years and why, you'll have to do a technical evaluation of your potential alternative. This can take longer if things are more complex – the sort of insight money can't buy, although Gartner will be happy to sell you some anyway. To be fair to the analyst, the world is still full of botched migrations so there's still a need to keep repeating the starkly obvious. Even with order-of-ten error bars like "Each VM will cost between $300 and $3,000 to migrate," that has to be worth something.
The serious takeaways of the Gartner report have little to do with the mechanics of escaping an iniquitous new overlord. Sleepwalking into a lock-in because of vendor insinuation is on you, and if you don't already know how much of your corporate soul is in hock to Broadcom, then your problem isn't being unable to plan an escape. It's that your picture of your infrastructure is too fuzzy to plan or test security, disaster recovery, or indeed any unexpected change that vendors, employees or customers suddenly need.
Likewise, the time to start technical evaluation of alternatives is sometime before you think they may be needed. If you're the sort of enterprise Gartner's aiming this report at, with a hundred plus servers running a multiplicity of services and a complex heterogeneous fabric, you need to have someone on look-out duties. Evaluating future options can be part of a job description, or identify the team member with the home lab server cluster and shamelessly flatter them. Better yet, give them a small toys budget. RoI will be off the scale.
In short, if you don't have a high awareness of how things are working and how the industry's moving, you will be blindsided again and again. Get it right, and you'll need Gartner reports like a statue needs toilet paper.
This doesn't fix the corporate timidity implicit in "everyone's asking what everyone else is doing, so nobody does anything." Seen as risk analysis, where a working system is worth extra expenditure because the risk of it going wrong is much less than with a migration to a novel solution. Doing nothing is always easier than giving yourself work that could backfire, and good luck spotting where that motivation influences the risk equation.
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This is why Microsoft is Microsoft, and why Broadcom's strategy is to join the club of too expensive to escape, too big to care. The fix isn't for individual organizations to be extra brave, but for lots of orgs to recognize their common issues and work together, along more enlightened vendors, in creating a common framework for enterprise virtualization aimed exactly at defanging the Broadcom vampire bat. Sharing risk is hugely powerful, it's how insurance supports the mercantile and financial world machines, and it can be extraordinarily robust.
A hundred companies cooperating on tech evaluations of a Broadcom competitor would cost none of them any more than if they all did it behind closed doors. The risk of something important going unspotted, though, is massively reduced, and the motivation to fix or enhance components to solve problems massively increased. Instead of asking everyone else what they're doing, ask everyone else what they need to do.
Yeah, sharing projects across organizations and being open about it could never work, it'd be like some sort of cancer. Right? Wrong.
If it did work, though, the idea of using an essentially vendor-neutral technology like virtualization to suck the blood out of the entire stack, well, that would be gone. Everyone would benefit – well, almost. There may be some bats going hungry. Perhaps Gartner could write a report on that. ®