These days, there’s no shortage of sources from which to gain insights about new consumer technologies and services. However, if you’re an enterprise IT buyer, unvarnished opinions from real users can be a bit more difficult to come by.
While you can find plenty of verified user reviews on sites like G2, TrustRadius, and Gartner Peer Insights, to really get a sense of what’s happening in the IT trenches these days, it’s worth checking out the social news site Reddit where on communities like r/sysadmin, r/virtualization, and r/kubernetes you’ll find a wealth of firsthand accounts and practical discussions. Here, IT professionals and tech enthusiasts share their experiences and advice, offering a raw, unfiltered look at the real-world application of various technologies, troubleshooting tips, and real-word user stories.
When Broadcom announced its intention to acquire VMware late last year, a large number of users took to their subreddit of choice with their questions and concerns: how would this acquisition impact VMware's product roadmap and innovation? What implications could this have for existing VMware customers, particularly in terms of support and service continuity? Could there be potential changes in licensing terms or price adjustments that might affect long-term budget planning? And importantly, how might this influence the overall market, especially for managed service providers and other partners and who have standardized their deployments on VMware?
In short, there was no small amount of FUD and as we’ve seen over the past few months, many VMware users were beginning to see their own worst fears, uncertainty and doubt come to pass:
As our co-founder and CEO Jeff Ready pointed out in this recent CRN interview, Broadcom is running the same ‘profit harvesting’ playbook with VMware that they’ve done in the past (i.e., Symantec, Computer Associates) with the goal of maximizing short-term profitability by focusing on their top echelon of customers while basically telling the rest of their users to kick rocks:
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But it’s not just small and medium-sized enterprise organizations that are feeling the squeeze. Educational institutions who have long relied on VMware to improve the efficiency of their IT systems are also expressing their frustration as their new licensing terms come due, with many users complaining of rate hikes of 10 to 20X their existing terms:
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And not even state and local public safety government agencies, including those that provide critical emergency 911 services, are being spared:
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And of course there are the thousands of VMware partners who are being unceremoniously dumped by Broadcom as they will now be directly supporting their top 600 customer base:
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We’ve also seen a number of organic discussions taking place on Reddit asking how Scale Computing stacks up against VMware and soliciting feedback from Scale Computing customers and partners about their experience:
Scale Compute Compared to VMware.
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Does anyone actually use Scale Computing?
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If you’re thinking of making the switch from VMware to Scale Computing, we’ve created a few special programs to help VMware customers and partners get up and running as quickly as possible:
- VMware Rip & Replace Promotion: Offering 25% discount on Scale Computing products and services for partners bringing new customers
- Seamless Switch Promotion: Scale Computing will cover any remaining VMware contract term at no charge for up to 12 months when a customer moves to SC//Platform
- Migration Services: Scale Computing offers a range of migration services for moving all of your workloads to SC//HyperCore, including quickstart, self-managed and fully-managed
And if you’re on Reddit, you can follow us here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ScaleComputing/