Does Broadcom have you over a Barrel?

The UK VMUG Town Hall held on 2nd February 2024 highlighted a lot of ill feelings towards the way that they feel Broadcom has treated them.

A number of respondents were against subscription licences, but there needs to be a realisation that, even if they move to Windows Hyper-V, that to enable the VM migration you must have licences that support VM movement. This means Software Assurance, this is also a subscription model.

If you are taking support contracts, you are paying a subscription. We cannot expect organisations to provide enterprise support for free and still exist, this makes no commercial sense for anyone.

I think it is now a fact, that in every walk of life, we see subscription services, but this is nothing new. I started my career as a TV and Video engineer at DER (Part of the Thorn EMI Group), we rented TV's, Video Recorders, Video Camera's, Satellite Systems and the Video media. Things became more reliable, people moved to a model of owning equipment, but those that wanted the latest and greatest continued to rent. The media has always been available on rent, how it has been delivered has changed; now it is Netflix, Spotify, Sky etc. Of course you can buy the physical media or digital downloads and still own them, but it comes down to choices.

The reality is, each organisation's needs are different; those that want flexibility and need to push the boundaries as development of technology happens will continue to look for organisations like Zadara, which enables you to operate a cloud model wherever you need it, including your own Data Centre.

I think, where people are getting hung up is the fact that Broadcom has moved to a subscription and pay up front model. You have no choice, as this means that if you need extra licences, or you are at the end of your support subscription, you are over a barrel, unless you can move to something else quickly.

If this is you and you don't want an up front model, but a flexible environment that enables you to create Virtual Machines, deploy Kubernetes as part of a transformation model, you want to be able to select Block, File and Object for your application needs, would like to operate in a multi-tenant, or application separation model for security, then come and talk to us, we have Service Provider Partners and Reseller Partners that can make some of this pain go away.