Heads I Win Tails You Lose

We enter into 2024 with lot of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), I want to share some of my thoughts.

Broadcom has finally acquired VMware and we are seeing mass disruption with Reseller and now Cloud provider partner contracts being torn up.

These organisations suddenly find their heads in a spin and chasing their tails on what to do about it.

It seems clear that the 80:20 rule is being applied in that only the 20% that generate 80% of the real profit are going to be invited to the club.

However times have changed, I have long been an advocate of what VMware has brought to the world. I was presented with a roadmap using multicore CPU's and the capabilities that virtualisation was going to bring back in 2002. VMware have delivered on this, built a very capable suite of products that many organisations have built their ecosystem around. Why? It brought simplicity, easier deployment models than purchasing physical servers, racking them deploying a single OS, a single Application and wasting 90% of the resources while burning through power needlessly.

This is not the end of VMware it is simply morphing into something different, it has to. Since 2006 we have seen new challenges emerge like Cloud Services from AWS, Microsoft, Google and many more including Zadara my employer.

These services have not been built on top of VMware, they may include VMware in their ecosystem, but they have taken the concepts first introduced by VMware and some of competing technologies like Sun Solaris containers, crafted them together on an open source Linux Kernel and developed an Application Delivery Platform.

These platforms have introduced new capabilities, Multi-tenant Virtual Private Clouds, VMware has followed this with VMware Cloud Director, Tanzu, NSX-T ( via acquisition of Nicira in 2012) and many other organisations such as CloudHealth.

Many people have invested in VMware for their technical skills and their businesses. I am among them and I am proud of the journey that they have helped me embark upon across a lot of my working life. However change constantly happens and it always will; it is not about winners and losers it is about making things better continuously.

We are heading towards a new era, every industry goes through automation, change disruption, Information Technology is no different, but it touches and impacts everyone.

The image in this post was generated by Artificial Intelligence, this was done on purpose, I didn't rack a server, I didn't even mandate a hypervisor, I didn't mandate an operating system, a container orchestrator or even the software application to be installed.

I had a business need, I wanted an image with a certain set of parameters, I didn't want to go and search for some copyrighted image that I may not have had the right to use. I did not go to a creative team and wait weeks for the image to be created in their overloaded queue of tasks. I simply consumed a service, I had a choice, there are different vendors offering different things. I did a little research, I looked at the options, I tried a few out and I picked the one that gave me the best option for what I needed to get the task done.

For my esteemed fellows that are staring down the barrel of what is coming next and all of the FUD that is going around, stop, take a breath, think about what it is that the business needs moving forward. Talk to different vendors and the options they present, you have choices and this includes remaining with VMware if you are an end user, but this may mean a different supplier, you may be uncomfortable with that.

For the Partners that are being cast aside, there are alternatives, you can add different mechanisms for enabling your customers to succeed. Don't just flip a coin, you will be gambling with the outcome.

Find a partner that helps you keep your head and stops you chasing your tails.