Marketing Milestone 2024: Whither VM?
January 3, 2025
When a vendor jacks up prices tenfold, customers tend to look elsewhere. If VMware‘s new leadership thought its clients had no other options, it was mistaken. Ars Technica reports, “Company Claims 1.000 Percent Price Hike Drove it from VMware to Open Source Rival.” We knew some were unhappy with changes Broadcom made since it bought VMware in November, 2023. For example, nixing perpetual license sales sent costs soaring for many. (Broadcom claims that move was planned before it bought VMware.) Now, one firm that had enough has come forward. Writer Scharon Harding tells us:
“According to a report from The Register today, Beeks Group, a cloud operator headquartered in the United Kingdom, has moved most of its 20,000-plus virtual machines (VMs) off VMware and to OpenNebula, an open source cloud and edge computing platform. Beeks Group sells virtual private servers and bare metal servers to financial service providers. It still has some VMware VMs, but ‘the majority’ of its machines are currently on OpenNebula, The Register reported. Beeks’ head of production management, Matthew Cretney, said that one of the reasons for Beeks’ migration was a VMware bill for ’10 times the sum it previously paid for software licenses,’ per The Register. According to Beeks, OpenNebula has enabled the company to dedicate more of its 3,000 bare metal server fleet to client loads instead of to VM management, as it had to with VMware. With OpenNebula purportedly requiring less management overhead, Beeks is reporting a 200 percent increase in VM efficiency since it now has more VMs on each server.”
Less expensive and more efficient? That is a no-brainer. OpenNebula‘s CEO says other organizations that are making the switch, though he declined to name them. Though Broadcom knows some customers are jumping ship, it may believe its changes are lucrative enough to make up for their absence. At the same time, it is offering an olive branch to small and medium-sized businesses with a less pricy subscription tier designed for them. Will it stem the exodus, or is it already too late?
Cynthia Murrell, January 3, 2024
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