Customers dismayed by Broadcom's move to selling costly bundles such as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) will realize its value if they'd just use more of the components, the company's CTO says.
VMware, now a Broadcom subsidiary, is shifting away from selling perpetual licenses for individual products. It instead offers subscription bundles of software and support, such as its flagship VCF private cloud platform โ version 9 of which was released this week.
The largest enterprise users seem content with this. Broadcom chief Hock Tan told investors this month that 87 percent of VMware's top 10,000 customers have signed up for VCF.
However some smaller and middle sized customers reacted negatively to the licensing changes, claiming their costs have increased by eight to 15 times since the Broadcom acquisition, and there are many stories of firms planning to migrate their workloads from VMware to an alternative platform in future because of this.
"A lot of those stories around cost don't play out when we actually get to sit down with the customer and talk to them about their situation, what they need, and what we're going to do with them," said Broadcom's EMEA chief technology officer, Joe Baguley.
"Initially people might go 'all the prices have gone up,' but those 87 percent of people that have renewed with us have renewed because they've chosen VCF as their strategy going forward," he claimed.
Do they really think anyone believes this? We know they sure don't. Broadcom's MO for ages now has been to buy successful companies and gut them for short term profit, then move on.
Who is served by the CTO making this statement? His own barely clinging on remaining shred of his malnourished and abandoned sense of concience?
Like, of course something is more worth the cost if you fully utilize all its features. But if the majority of your user base are complaining of the price and don't need or use the full feature set, it's not the customer's job to change their business use cases to fit your profit needs. It's your job to offer the product they actually need.