Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B (opens in new tab)

After being acquired by Avago, Broadcom ceased to be a single company. It’s a conglomerate of entities/BUs that are explicitly asked to NOT work cooperatively, so that each entity can be sold at moment’s notice if it doesn’t deliver the right financial results anymore.

Chances are that the current leadership doesn’t care about how VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase metrics that Wall Street considers important.

Expect major cuts in R&D, receptionists, travel expenses, general benefits, and virtually no hiring of college grads or interns. You’ll be on the phone in a queue for hours to get outsourced IT support.

Support of open source should be the least of your worries.

Stock price might go up though…

VMware learned their lesson from OpenStack, where emerging upstream technology threatened their virtualization monopoly. They also were forced to go in this direction by their enterprise customers, who are very dependent themselves on open source technology.

One of the opportunities at VMware is monetize the open source investment more effectively, especially Kubernetes. I still don't totally understand how they plan to do that but wish them (you) all well.

Disclaimer: Former employee of VMware

I would be mildly interested in a 5 minute pitch of what VMware is offering these days, it's been 15 years since I've touched any of their products and the way they were doing things then really seems like it is becoming increasingly irrelevant so what have they been doing instead? It looks like my vague guess of "the same but also on top of cloud providers" seems to be about right given a quick glance at their website, but I'm curious to know a bit more.

Working for a client of Broadcom, I can say that no, they don't understand how opensource works. Have a problem with one of their products which they blame on an upstream bug. They don't allocate an engineer to fix said upstream bug, supplied an workaround that didn't solve the problem just reduced number of occurrences and that's it.

Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX?

Taking driver code out of Linux and just running it inside the hypervisor has to be the most brazen violations possible.

I can only hope they let VMware operate independently and continue growing like they've done in the past decade.

What does the upstream means?

So he Jack Welched his own corporation?

But did he know EMC's ownership of VMWare in 2016 was going to turn out to be such a stellar cloud performer, or was that just IP portfolio luck?

It's relevant that they are talking about VMware's security portfolio.

The vast majority of why people are VMware proponents is down to their virtualisation software. It's why we were big resellers for a while. But for the last few years, their own sales people have only wanted to talk about security products, quite plainly acknowledging stagnant growth in on premise virtualisation.

But virtualisation is in my view the only place they've made it big. You've just linked a Reddit post in /r/cybersecurity talking about security products and every reply is about how to replace ESXi. It'll be interesting to see how their future pans out.

Yep, that's Broadcom's business model ... buy a business (VMWare), ignore its smaller customers, upsell the Fortune 500 on the product (VMWare) to push out competing solutions, and keep the line items on those Fortune 500 bills growing. It's worked for them I guess. I left a Broadcom acquisition before the takeover.

This feels way too pessimistic, VMware got big before open source virtualization took off.

I imagine someone could use docker instead of VMware in most cases, and if that's not possible then hire some people to make it so.

Vendor lockin is a scary thing, the people who are really going to hurt here are mega super corps who are now going to have to pay out the nose. If you're a smaller company, you should be moving to docker or another open source solution anyway.

Linked by Reddit poster: https://kicksec.io/vmware-too-big-to-fail/

> > Announcing the deal, Broadcom said the acquisition was part of its strategy to buy “established mission-critical technology businesses”.

> Seems like their software strategy is to buy a business which doesn't have much room to grow but is extremely entrenched, and then reduce staffing and raise prices as much as possible.

Why wouldn't you just post to the article directly, and bypass the horrible Reddit web site for the redirect?

virt-v2v can import VMs from VMware to QEMU/KVM-based systems. https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html

There is also Openstack, oVirt, and LXD (does KVM now).

> Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel based virtual machines.

It's not the lower level primitives here that are valuable from VMware, it's the higher level abstractions built on top of them that facilitate easier management and use by (relatively) less technical people.

You can give a "good at Windows" type technician a few hours of training and they can put together a usable vCenter deployment, including things like corporate SSO and such. They can drag and drop things around and it'll mostly work. And when things go wrong and this person is confused about what to do, they can call up support for help.

Obviously, this is centered on-prem, which is indeed shrinking - but a lot of orgs have a lot of investment in stuff running on site, and there are still plenty of cases where having e.g. lots of storage and enough compute to "process" it in some way physically close to office users can speed up their workflows.

VMware used to be centered around Virtualization until 2015-16 or so. Since then it has moved / expanded to Software defined Datacenters (technically virtualization, yes), Automation, Security (Carbon Black) and lately, K8s (with Tanzu). That does not mean a good chunk of revenue might still be from virtualization - FWIW, I do not have any idea on that.

Disclaimer: I am an ex-employee of VMware.

> Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud.

This is something that the HN crowd repeats as if it were an obvious axiom where no scrutiny is needed. While I'm sure it's true that there's a general movement towards cloud-based infrastructure, there is a very real and non-trivial part of the IT infrastructure of any country that will not move to the cloud in the coming decade, if it ever will. This general movement is not the same thing as "everything will eventually have moved".

The hypothesis that on-site virtualization somehow is an obviously dying technology assumes that it must be true that on-site hosting will stop existing, which I have a very hard time believing. If nothing else (and there are plenty of "elses"), strict data security and privacy concerns will keep on-site hosting moated for a long time.

Not a fan of vmware (I used to work there) but pretty much no one currently can compete with VMware’s full product line and optimizations

Azure uses Hyper-V under the hood not kvm. Its also not built on Linux.

I was under the impression each of those had custom hypervisors? While perhaps still Linux that doesn’t seem like a commodity.

I also don't see any obvious synergies with a company that specializes in network chips.

Holy crap! Look at these acquisitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware#Acquisitions

I can't say it's not possible, but Broadcom (the corporation, not the semiconductor division within Broadcom) acts more like a holding company. I'd make a comparison to private equity but the goal there is typically to flip the company for a profit. Broadcom's goal is typically to milk high-margin sales for established companies. Purchase, identify the most profitable parts, and cull everything else. Their MO is typically not strategic acquisitions for innovation. If any of their acquisitions can be called strategic it would be in how much the company's top customers align with Broadcom's, which allows them to increase vendor lock-in and jack the price.

It might be the hypervisor and related ecosystem of private cloud today, but I wouldn’t bet $61B on VMWare against the entire field (xen/kvm in Type 1, and all the container solutions) for 2027.

Who's Tim?

In 2021 Broadcom semiconductor revenue was $18.8B out of $27.5 billion. Broadcom has a large portfolio of enterprise software offerings.

The web page for their software offerings is at https://software.broadcom.com/ . The interesting thing you'll notice is that they do not list any specific software they offer (e.g. Symantec for enterprise security, which by the way is separate from Norton now). Rather they sell you on their ability to deliver on four specific enterprise functional needs.

They won't answer your call to buy their suite unless you're in the Fortune 500. They will try to sell you on their whole suite. They will upsell you on any new acquisition, eg VMWare.

They might renew my personal VMWare Fusion license for another year but would probably close that down soon for not being core. On the M1 I've moved on anyway to UTM.

EDIT: word choice

Broadcom likes to buy big companies with big moats that trade at a reasonable multiple because they have a mature growth profile. There are no more chip companies left with that profile except Qualcomm, which they tried to buy, and maybe Intel although their moat is fading. So they pivoted to software.

IIRC Broadcom was sold to an equities group some years ago, so it's not really broadcom the chip manufacturer...but rather an investment company for tech

Pairing virtualization software tech with hardware chipsets that directly support it seems like a good plan.

Why not both? There's no reason NOT to get into enterprise software. You have hundreds of sales people selling chipsets to enterprise and you're telling me it would be dumb not to have them increase their attach rate?

Because they want something that’s not affected by the chip shortage.

Because corporate capitalism and investors expect ever higher returns. So a company that does good at what it does needs to look at new revenue sources to please investors which after a while just does mediocre at everything.

If the stock is trading at $120/share that means everyone who owns stock (and is paying attention and offering it for sale) won’t sell for less than $120. But that doesn’t mean all of them, or even most of them, would sell for $120. Many of them probably believe their stock should be worth more than $120 and expect the price to go up in the future. So if you want to buy out the whole company you have to pitch a price high enough that a majority of shareholders (or the board of directors as their fiduciary proxy) agree to sell at that price. This is basically guaranteed to be a substantially higher price than whatever the current market price is, because if the average shareholder didn’t expect the stock price to go up, why are they holding shares?

As the deal becomes increasingly likely to go through, the stock price will likely gradually shift up to match the deal price.

"Under the terms of the agreement, which has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, VMware shareholders will elect to receive either $142.50 in cash or 0.2520 shares of Broadcom common stock for each VMware share. The shareholder election will be subject to proration, resulting in approximately 50% of VMware’s shares being exchanged for cash consideration and 50% being exchanged for Broadcom common stock. Based on the closing price of Broadcom common stock on May 25, 2022, the total $138.23 per-share consideration represents a 44% premium to the closing price of VMware common stock on May 20, 2022, the last trading day prior to media speculation regarding a potential transaction, and a 32% premium to VMware’s unaffected 30-day volume weighted average price (VWAP). Upon closing of the transaction, based on the outstanding shares of each company as of the date hereof, current Broadcom shareholders will own approximately 88% and current VMware shareholders will own approximately 12% of the combined company on a fully diluted basis. " [1]

1. The deal might not go through, or the terms might change.

2. You might not be able to get 100% cash for your shares.

[1] https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/e...

Your instincts are right, it's just that the price jump happened on Monday when the talks were reported in the press over the weekend. It jumped from ~$95 on the Friday close to $115 on the open, ~20%.

VMWare Fusion on M1 was already way behind (to an absurd point: it has been > 1 year 1/2 after the M1 launch, and VMWare has not yet launched a release of Fusion for it, only betas, and they do not target Windows). Overwhelming most of VMWare business is about other products anyway.

I’ve been going back and forth every few years between Fusion and || Desktop. I’m currently on a || swing. I guess I’ll be staying here for a while.

Hibernate isn't part of the Pivotal portfolio. I'm sure there are contributions by Pivotal employees, but the core Hibernate engineering team is employed by Red Hat, who also own the trademark, etc.

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and used to be part of the Hibernate team

I do, and this was what sprung to my mind.

I feel like Pivotal has been doing a great job lately - especially with Spring. I'd hate to see Broadcomm mess with this, but it feels highly possible.

We are a tiny bootstrapped startup. Spring is critical for us and we rely on RabbitMQ. This news is concerning to say the least.

I've no idea how well the Symantec acquisition worked for Broadcom, but it was particularly painful for anyone using Symantec products.

The ordering/renewal process was so messed up by the transition that for approximately 18 months it was almost impossible to get a quote or place an order, even to renew an existing subscription, long enough that Symantec started just giving out subscription extensions to tide people over until the order process worked again.

>Is this just a pure diversification play?

Probably. 6 months ago they were looking at acquiring SAS (which didn't go anywhere). The core competencies for that of those companies are even less related to what Broadcom does.

yes consider Broadcom bought Symantec.

EMC bought VMware for $650 million and Dell bought EMC for $74 billion and now sold VMware for $61 billion so it worked out for someone.

The more important question is whether these type of acquisitions end up well for the customer or the employees. And in that case, I think the answer is rarely yes.

The point of massive acquisitions are to enrich company stockholders (generally the CxO's and key management), lock up key engineering talent from the market, and give the manager who lead the acquisition a fat bonus. Generally, everyone else loses. To offset the cost, typically value is extracted from the bought company until the product's value dies. Short term-wise, the people involved will get a lot of money and be gone by the time the consequences cannot be ignored.

That said, acquisitions can work if there is due diligence. I'm in a company that has acquired several companies in a related field. Each of the companies have had complementary products, and the cultures were vetted to be similar ours before purchase, ie small groups (30-50 people) who have demonstrated high skill, high trust, and low ego. Finally, there has been an effort keep groups generally autonomous while finding ways to synergize employees and services. There has been a strong feeling of working together. Groups have been willing to share their expertise and experience with other.

I guess in other words: the acquisition is a good idea, even if a product is subsumed into another product, there is plenty of real work to go around for employees to do. If you have to promptly fire people "because redundancy," it wasn't being done to improve your position in the field.

> Do these type of transactions ever end up well for either the acquirer or the acquired company?

It depends on what you mean by "end up well" and who, exactly, is meant by "acquirer" and "acquired". Yes, they're lucrative and worthwhile from the point of finance people, a rarified sliver of stake-holders and the law firms who buzz around to service all these. If they weren't you would not be seeing them as much.

From the point of view of technology advancement, the professionals who want to actually WORK in these domains, and the customers who depend on the products? No. These mergers/acquisitions are at best a mixed bag and more often a downgrade, or worst of all, a career-derailing adjustment.

I think Trello and Atlassian went well (massively different scale, though). I think the rep is that Atlassian mainly does well by leaving the companies alone as independent organizations, more like investment positions rather than actually merging the tech.

20 years ago when I was part of a company that was acquired the executives told us that only 1 in 4 were successful, but they were determined to make us one of the successful ones. (it wasn't)

I have no idea if the 1 in 4 number is correct, but it feels reasonable.

Yes. See Oracle.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/market...

More than half of acquisitions and mergers fail, depending on the industry.

It's been reported before: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-22/broadcom-...

Insider trading... but the very people who are supposed to be preventing this are involved in thr same thing all the time.

There were rumours around, I think I even saw them on HN.

Yeah this has me a little concerned, but only a little at this time. The only reason I'm not feeling any major anxiety yet is due to the ubiquity of Spring libraries/frameworks/products. They're everywhere used by thousands of companies, so it would be unlikely that this acquisition would have any dramatic changes for Spring. Perhaps a change in ownership or governance will occur, but hopefully there will be little or no impact.

I mean...how do you define downturn?

If you mean recession, as defined by two consecutive quarters of dropping GDP - if GDP drops, stock markets drop. Not sure the directionality there, but the two are usually part and parcel.

If stock prices drop, it's a great time for acquisitions if you're sitting on cash.

I suspect any time stock markets drop sufficiently, you'll see increased M&A activity, regardless of whether it is prolonged enough to count as a recession.

Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them.

Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Since software isn't their core business, they pay an external company to keep their software running. Like it or not, cloud providers are for software companies, and most companies have no interest in becoming a software company. They might have some small groups that do analytics or software in-house, and those groups might use cloud providers, but all the essential software will be run by a company you can call when something breaks, or if you're big enough embeds some staff in your office.

It's just good sense to outsource non-core functions. Software companies outsource hosting and datacenter stuff to AWS, etc. Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?

I am the 37 year old CTO and co-founder of a company that pays VMWare something like that per year because we need an endpoint management solution. We have a strong engineering team but that certainly isn’t something we are going to build ourselves. VMWare is not just virtualization.

We did the math at my previous employer. The cost of running OpenStack, in terms of training and day to day operations was higher than just paying VMware their licens fee. We even had a guy from RedHat help us do the cost analysis, didn't matter, cheaper to just pay VMware. This didn't even include the cost of doing the migration.

I can't imagine it being cheaper to build everything yourself on top of just plain KVM, or even LXC.

> "To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly"

You can see people spending millions of dollars a year to keep from having to deal with Linux as evidence that they are stupid. Or you can see it as evidence that Linux really is that bad. It works both ways.

VMware gives you a thing people can be trained on and certified on, a brand you can hire for and screen resumes on, a consistent environment which behaves in a predictable way that you really can turn employees into replacable cogs. Any helpdesk or admin employee can deal with VMware, any MSP, any tech recruiter, and a lot of training companies. You can get backup systems which "support VMware" and storage which integrates with VMware snapshots, and reporting tools which work with VMware.

It's almost not about the tech at all, it's about how do you build companies on shifting sands? You define interfaces for components which can be plugged together. "VMware" is an API or interface that the business can work to; vendors can say "deploy this OVF to VMware", sales can say to the business "this thing we need works with VMware" or to the customers "we can work with your VMware" or "our offering is trustworthy because we use VMware" and the customer recognises the name. HR can say "we need to hire people who know VMware" and that means something fairly specific to the wider world. "runs on Linux" and "people who know Linux" are wildly, wildly, variable and vague things which could mean "ran a website, minimum wage" or "turns SELinux off to make things run" or "was SRE for FAANG" or "did a PHD in AI for tuning networking stacks in HPC applications but doesn't know anything else".

You make software by defining interfaces and components that can be plugged together to make larger systems. Brands are that, for tech. Like you hire someone who "knows React" not someone who "is a programmer" because that's too vague and is as likely to get you someone who worked on a Java CRUD program or someone who worked on a Python log analyser. Like you hire a "service delivery manager" or a "customer account manager" and not "an employee".

It's a big plus in the corporate world to be able to outsource support. It's worth it for companies to pay VMWare, Microsoft, etc. larges sums of money for support contracts so they have someone to call when things break. While Microsoft sells Windows Server, they also try really hard to add on support contracts with it. Paying several thousand dollars a year for a support contract is probably cheaper than paying salary+benefits for someone within the company to maintain it, and you get the façade of talking directly to people who know the product inside and out

There is a whole world outside of silicon valley, crypto, and HN startups. There are huge companies that don't care a fart about open source, the newest buzzwords, or it's go/rust/java or c++. They want something they can get a full solutions from and that is companies like vmware, oracle, IBM, Dell. They want support from those corps when things fail and it's costing them millions of dollars per hour when the system breaks.

Throwing money at a problem is an easy thing to do, if you’ve got the money. Lock-in sucks, but having someone to blame doesn’t.

A friend uses VMWare in an IT role at a medium sized company. They don’t have a software engineering team, just a bunch of users and an IT skeleton crew; so it makes sense for them.

As someone who works in the MSP space, Enterprise basically runs this country from a business perspective. I'm not even kidding.

Microsoft has a monopoly on Corporate Domains/OS as it is.

Whether or not those specific companies are good deals absent legacy requirements, how many engineers can you hire for that $100K+ to DIY? And how are you going to convince your auditors that you're taking appropriate steps to mitigate your risk? Companies broadly need to make build vs. buy decisions about a lot of things and they should generally be pretty selective about what they build.

Presuming for a moment that you’re under 40 for the sake of conversation:

Have you ever considered the other way around? That is, “What changes with age that would make someone over 40 prefer outsourcing a problem to an enterprise?”

It’s possible that this trend is a result of a different perspective.

I work for a regular corp. We have a lot of servers, our annual hardware bill is 8 figures (just for our single project), more than our developer's wages. 100k is a drop.

One thing you are paying for is maturity (in both software and the engineers) and predictable behavior. When you need to run a business sometimes (almost all the time) it's easier to pay people to get out of your way so you can execute. Execution is everything in running a successful and profitable business. Don't be penny foolish.

You should always outsource any part of your business that is not part of your core competency and doesn’t give you a competitive advantage - ie “the undifferentiated heavy lifting”.

I worked at companies as a software developer from 1996 - 2012 that had to manage their own infrastructure. But today, the only company that I worked for back then that would be managing their own infrastructure today is the one that has mainframes and hardware that handle the backends for lottery systems across the US.

By 2012, there was a slow shift to the cloud.

I first was exposed to how large enterprises worked in 2017. I was hired to lead two green field implementations. But at the last minute they decided to “move to the cloud” neither they nor I knew anything about the cloud. They hired consultants and a Managed Service Provider. Of course the internal IT department was vigilantly defending their turf and the “consultants” were old school Netops folks who only knew how to “lift and shift” and duplicate an on prem infrastructure and all of the red tape to the cloud and of course it was more expensive than just using a colo.

I spent the next six months after the decision was made studying AWS and getting a certification not because I value certifications (I don’t). But it gave me a guided learning path to know what I didn’t know. It did open my eyes to what I wanted to do - work with companies - specifically developers and operations to show them how to actually take advantage of cloud and not just do lift and shifts - ie true “Devops”.

I left that company and went to a small startup for two years where I learned everything I know about “cloud application modernization” and then ended up in Professional Services at AWS.

Until I started working with large enterprises and government organizations from the consulting side, I never appreciated the concerns of large enterprises and how they aren’t in the “tech” business and it does make sense to outsource that knowledge - not to ProServe we don’t do that type of work - to external partners.

As far as VMWare, as silly as it sounds on the surface. Companies actually use VMWare to manage hybrid infrastructure on the cloud and on prem as a “single pane of glass”.

https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/

I personally don’t deal with those implementations. I stick with app dev.

Newer companies don't deal with Linux directly either. The vast majority use managed cloud services (kubernetes, containers, serverless, managed databases, etc.). For all practical purposes - most of the start-up players use "enterprise software" as well. It's just different enterprises.

> To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

New companies, too. There's a lot to be said for paying someone to make problems go away. Not everyone wants to write their own software or change their own oil.

Really? I work for a manufacturing company. We lose about $50k/hr if systems are down. Paying for vendor support is a fucking no brainer.

"Use proxmox" - fucking lol

Hire one person less and you've already broken even. Applies just the same to to any managed service on the cloud, to Outlook365 instead of your own email server, etc.

Legacy. Interoperability with other similar companies. Manpower requirements (far easier to onboard a junior developer with boring technologies)

The fat bosses above me get more cred by buying something expensive and ha ing everything outsourced, than doing something brilliant and inventing the future. This is the reason for it. I'm this way the fat bosses are left alone and can go home to their families, go on holidays, cabins and whatnot with not a gram of risk and uncertainty.

Yeah, a lot of companies which are raising world's consciousness wouldn't buy the grubby enterprise software.

If intellectual property (specifically software patents) were weakened, this would be less of a problem, right?

Companies don't buy companies, they buy IP, as I understand it.

We can but asia won’t. We can stop and let Asian tech giants eat us alive.

competition requires consolidation in order to acquire new lines of profit, it’s inevitable

Sure right after we dismember NATO. Oh wait…

EDIT: NATO shills don't like this comment!

This isn’t about the hypervisor. This is about the enterprise sales. A bank isn’t going to run their data center on qemu, regardless of the performance. They are going to go with the company that can sell them support contracts with dedicated engineers to answer the phone.

At the cost of giving away their billion dollars of R&D to their competition - QEMU is GPL licensed.

right but they wouldn't be able to own qemu. that's what they want

It's not merely about the performance, it's about the management layer on top, support contracts, enterprise sales etc.

VMware has the largest on-premises hypervisor footprint by a large margin and sells a zillion other software products to layer on top. Pretty much every large public company has a VMware footprint in their data center, and frequently have their entire on-prem infrastructure built on top of vSphere.

You can get three Dell servers and a VMware install ISO and have a hypervisor with a web interface, a distributed cluster filesystem replicating between the nodes, VM failover in case of hardware failure, live migration of VMs between nodes for maintenance (state and/or storage), a centralised update system, VLAN aware guest networking, isolated management networking, all up and running in production in half a day - less if you someone has already opened the boxes and racked it all up before hand. Without any great technical skills needed to setup any of it.

With a bit more planning and a larger environment and more licensing, and not much more tech skills, you'll have redundant trunked network links, it will migrate VMs between nodes to balance load, integrate with the node IPMI management to power hosts down when the load is light and power them on when the load increases, and for enough money on licensing it will keep two VMs on different host nodes in sync down to the CPU instruction in case one host fails nobody will notice. Also with not much tech skills.

And when I say "not much tech skills" you do need to understand enough about computing to plan it and cable things in properly and deal with VLANs and subnets and ISOs and DNS, routing, and VMware's way of doing networking, and the basics. But you need to know approximately nothing about /etc/ or XML or YAML, cluster quorums, elections, filesystem locking, heartbeat or watchdog services, distributed consensus protocols, package management, LVM, systemd, hypervisor subsystems, PAM modules, Kerberos, webservers, databases, Unix permissions, or etc.

I'm under no illusions that it's cheap, or bug-free, or that you never need to SSH in and poke it ever, or that it's the right thing for every task, or that it's the modern way. But it's an amazing packaging up of a lot of things into a worldbeating product, and its integration with Dell specifically - Dell hosts, Dell EMC storage - is such a good fit that makes me surprised and sad that Dell would sell VMware.