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Broadcom recently published a corporate blog welcoming more than 18,000 active VMware resellers into the Broadcom fold
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A former VMware employee said a lot of resellers are looking for alternatives and already selling other companies solutions
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Cato, Netskope, Nutanix, Scale Computing and verge.io are all aggressively going after VMware’s customers
Silverlinings checked in again with our VMware source, former employee Michael Leonard to get more info on how cloud software companies are trying to horn in on VMware by Broadcom’s market space, and how VMware’s partners (a.k.a. resellers) are reacting.
Since Broadcom closed its $61 billion acquisition of cloud maven VMware in late November 2023 it’s been a veritable rollercoaster ride. Broadcom unceremoniously booted VMware partners making under $500,000 annually, took VMware’s top 2,000 customer accounts directly under its wing, and invited larger resellers back into a Broadcom partner program.
Cindy Lloyd, VP of global partner and commercial sales at Broadcom, has recently published a corporate blog welcoming the more than 18,000 active VMware resellers into the Broadcom fold. “We gathered feedback from hundreds of partners globally — and the feedback was consistent,” she wrote. “Solving channel conflict, reevaluate profitability on renewals, incentivize long term adoption of our products, and simplifying were key themes in your feedback.”
The new partner program provides “a simple yet scalable framework for all of our business units and partner routes to market,” Lloyd said.
However, 2024 is going to be a year of “damage control” for VMware by Broadcom, Leonard told us.
“They are going to have to reassure these partners that ran off or were left hanging, right?” he commented. “I hear so many of saying that they’re looking at alternatives, now a lot of them are already signed up and can sell other companies.”
“I expect VMware is going to be quite some time on damage control,” Leonard said, because of the cavalier way Broadcom first dealt with VMware’s partners.
Competition in the cloud
Many cloud software companies are already trying to get a piece of VMware’s pie. As we have previously said, Cato, Netskope, Nutanix, Scale Computing and verge.io are all aggressively going after VMware’s customers.
Leonard noted that Fortinet is the latest to go down that path. “They’re certainly well-positioned, they’re up there in the top three, or four, for the SASE space.
VMware, meanwhile, still needs to develop its application modernization story, he added.
“The virtualization is the major product space, application modernization like Tanzu or SASE they’re still developing and they still need to innovate.” Leonard said. “I expect the innovation will be slower under Broadcom than VMware.”
“Just from from looking at the revenue perspective, I would expect the Tanzu unit and the edge unit and the telco RAN product to all be in trouble as far as revenue,” Leonard said. “Hock Tan [Broadcom CEO] has made comments that he sees this as a growing emerging space, so he might hang onto them for a while to see if his vision plays out, so it’s hard to say,” Leonard allowed.