I find myself writing this having not-long-ago had the press-release flash up on my phone to say that Broadcom has completed it’s acquisition of VMware, and after what seems and feels like the longest acquisition in history is ‘across the line’ as Top Gear would have said.
When you hear Hock Tan and Broadcom talking about what they want to do with VMware part of me starts to think that what we’re really seeing here is the completion of (or the last step in the completion of) the mission that VMware started on as it moved beyond vSphere Hypervisors in 2011/12 and moved towards it’s goal of Virtualising the whole datacenter (or as my good friend Joe Baguley, EMEA CTO for VMWare would say, the Operating System for Datacenters).
For a long time I’ve loved the way that Simon Wardley describes innovation, if you heard him speak in the mid 2010’s you’ll have heard him talk of the work that Robert X Cringley did around the concept of Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners, and the more I think about it the more I realise that’s what this is about for VMware and Broadcom – and if that’s the case, what it means for me.
VMware as a Pioneer
When I joined VMware in 2011/12 it was just emerging as a serious market disruptor – vSphere and Virtualisation had totally changed the way that people could interact with, manage and deploy compute. As it moved forward from 2011/12 the focus because virtualising the rest of the stack, specifically network and storage with vSAN and NSX – the goal here was to move all elements of the datacenter (Compute, Network and Storage) into software.
The focus back then was to get something that was ‘good enough’ out of the door, entering a market that was not just poorly understood but was completley new – VMware was defining it’s market from the ground up, first in Compute, then Storage and then finally with Network virtualisation. Every customer deployment was custom build, custom architected.
VMware as a Settler
Looking back I now realise that we were in the ‘Settler’ phase of the Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners model. We were experiencing rapid growth and what we needed to do was listen to customers, spot the trends and direction of travel and feed that back into Engineering and R&D to drive constant improvement in what we brought to market. We started to step away from pure organic innovation (I can still remember the tagline ‘Fearless Innovators’) and acquisition and integration was becoming more and more important – with a gradual trend towards realising that engineered solutions were going to be more important than trying to support 5000 snowflakes, in face you could argue that was something that the VVD (VMware Validated Designs) program took up the mantle of. During this phase VMware would grow up, now focussing on product rather than snowflakes.
Broadcom by VMware as a Town Planner
It seems to me that the focus for Broadcom therefore is to take VMware forward in a ‘Town Planning’ state of operation. High volume, high margin – focussing on standardisation and stability. Broadcom’s CEO Hock Tan has already spoken at VMware Explore and in the media of his desire to double down on VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) the core platform that VMware has brought to market – and to me that’s exactly what the ‘Town Planner’ phase of VMware will see. A tight focus on getting VMware’s Cloud Foundation platform deployed everywhere, at scale as a pure commodity.
It’s going to be fascinating to see where this goes from here – there is huge potential and upside for Broadcom if they get this right, as well as great peril if they get it wrong.
And the question I have to wrestle with, is do I want to be a Town Planner, am I a town planner, or do I want to move on to something new, feeling from my perspective at least, it’s #MissionAccomplished at VMware !
Popcorn at the ready !
Read more on Simon’s great take on Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners here