Amid Broadcom’s subscription push, VMware has killed off a SaaS product

Broadcom has killed off a VMware software-as-a-service product, despite also moving the virtualization giant’s other wares to subscription-only licenses – the sort of arrangement at which SaaS excels.

The axed product is Aria SaaS, a cloudy version of VMware’s Aria management tools (which were previously sold under the “vRealize” brand).

VMware by Broadcom last week decided to stop selling the Saas-y suite because it’s bundled Aria into its vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation offerings. Both can be run on-prem or in SaaS mode in several clouds.

Shuttering the SaaS service is consistent with Broadcom’s decision to sell only bundles of VMware products, plus add-ons for extra capabilities. But it also unwinds VMware’s past strategy of offering some of its tools as SaaS to relieve users of the need to manage infrastructure. Indeed, VMware touted its SaaS offerings as in many ways superior to its packaged products, partly because delivering them as SaaS meant it could innovate more quickly.

Broadcom reckons killing off Aria SaaS will have the upside of prompting its partners to offer Aria as-a-service by deploying its Cloud Foundation suite.

Aria SaaS was one of 59 products that VMware stopped selling as standalone offerings last week. Not all were bundled into VMware by Broadcom’s new suites. That absence doesn’t necessarily denote death: some of the discontinued products were themselves bundles.

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