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It's official: VMware doesn't care about you

As Broadcom VMware hammers customers with new changes in the mistaken belief they can’t escape the lock-in, platform engineering and modular Internal Developers offer an escape route🔥

Just a few months ago, Forrester predicted that 20% of all VMware customers would leave this year. It seems like Broadcom is trying to speedrun that stat. After buying VMware for $61 billion, and announcing their intent to “focus on their core 600 customers” AND “double earnings in the next 5 years”, VMware has since dropped almost 50 products, removed permanent licenses, switched customers to subscriptions, and from the conversations i’ve been having with customers - hit people with estimated 600-1000% price increases.

That sure is a lot of pain in a short time… Clearly Broadcom is counting on one thing, and if you’ve much experience with VMware, you have experienced the impact of that lock-in. It’s never been easy to exit the VMware ecosystem, but there has also never been much reason to.

Until now - on both counts.

In the last week, I helped publish a whitepaper that clearly breaks down how you can use platform engineering and a modular Internal Developer Platform to exit the VMware ecosystem. Specifically in three main cases:

1. You’re using Tanzu as the K8s dial tone. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) might run on VMware or any cloud provider. 
2. You are using Tanzu Application Service (TAS), the former Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF ). You are running on VMware or any cloud provider.
3. Case 3: You are using Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) and you are deeply integrated with all special capabilities that VMware has built into it like Mission Control or Wavefront.

Each has varying degrees of challenge, but in each case platform engineering offers a clear, simple and tested solution.

Whether you’re looking to escape VMware yourself, or not.

The work in this whitepaper shows what I’ve believed for a long time. Platform engineering has the power to radically reshape the current landscape.

And to think we’re just getting started.

Quick bites

Articles that blew me away: 

• Broadcom’s VMware Overhaul Draws Attention of CIOs

From the community:

• Help the Community better for all of us!