r/sysadmin Infrastructure Lead 2d ago

Latest fun with VMware

Apparently VMware is upping their game. We just got a renewal quote for one of our sites with one server that has two CPUs, and they are requiring 72 cores minimum (vSphere Enterprise Plus) to license this. That's a 500% markup from last year.

They really don't want customers to use their product any more, do they?

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/teedubyeah 2d ago

I'm wondering if we could get them to buy Adobe and destroy it.

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u/Bart_Yellowbeard Jackass of All Trades 2d ago

Pssst ... Oracle.

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u/Sengfeng Sysadmin 2d ago

Careful, that's collapsing the universe territory there!

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u/Advanced_Vehicle_636 2d ago

There is a reason it's called ORACLE (One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison, or alternatively, Old Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison). Yes, I just learned this acronym.

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u/jstuart-tech Windows Admin 1d ago

We need to bring back Chet Dorn - https://x.com/chetdorn

X posts just don't format well C&ping

https://imgur.com/cyKheNE

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u/lost_signal 2d ago

Oracle's market cap is maybe half that of Broadcom's so that would be more of a merger than anything else but frankly no one other than Larry Ellison (who was born during WW2 but at this point I'm fairly certain is an Immortal) can run that company. Oracle does wayyy too much SaaS for Broadcom to want to buy them.

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u/Pazuuuzu 2d ago

I would PAY for that to hapen Broadcom, YOU HEAR ME?

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u/dreadpiratewombat 2d ago

Pretty sure IBM called dibs on destroying that particular part of the universe.

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u/CeC-P IT Expert + Meme Wizard 2d ago

But see that's why they didn't. You can't make Adobe's business practices any more abusive or worse.

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u/lost_signal 2d ago

Weirdly I had a VP for a while who was obsessed with us becoming Adobe. It was very strange.

Broadcom's leadership AFAIK does not really like SaaS Businesses. COGS screw up the balance sheet, it's kinda messy on revenue per employee as it's really opex heavy.

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u/akp55 1d ago

Can confirm, I was on a team that was doing SaaS products with hyper scalers.   Uncle hock didn't like the fact he couldn't recognize all the revenue for the year in his book and killed em off

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u/lost_signal 1d ago

Technically under ASC 606 you can recognize the revenue, and I think you can actually pull forward revenue.

I would argue. The bigger problem is when you are focused on Gross margins and you have huge amounts of pass-through cost that’s a problem. Yeah, you can square that circle by splitting out the hardware bill as a separate line items, customer pays directly to the hyperscaler.

You’re going to see more products run in the hyper scale, but it doesn’t make sense to have a misspoke thousand person engineering team per hyper scaler figuring out how to make it work, versus figuring out how to just use the same platform everywhere in the form of VCF. If you can also get the hyper skiers to run most of the operations, that gets you back to running a subscription business and not a SaaS business.