On this episode of the Six Five On the Road, hosts Keith Townsend and Dave Nicholson are joined by VMware User Group’s Brad Tompkins, Executive Director, for a conversation on the latest updates and insights following VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom.
Their discussion covers:
- The impact of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware on the user community.
- The anticipated changes in VMware’s product and service offerings.
- VMUG’s strategy to support its members during this transition.
- Key initiatives VMUG is focusing on to enhance value for its members.
- Overview of upcoming VMUG events and how to get involved.
Learn more at VMUG. Also, discover more about this collaboration at Solidigm.
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Transcript:
Keith Townsend: Welcome back to coverage of Six Five On The Road, sponsored by Solidigm, for Keith Townsend and my host, Dave Nicholson. Dave, good to be hosting with you again.
Dave Nicholson: Good to be here. Good to be here. Interesting subject we’re about to dive into.
Keith Townsend: We’re chomping at the bit. If you’ve seen me interview Brad Tompkins, Executive Director of VMware User Group. We’re not going to make fun. We’re not going to call it the VMware Unhappy Group.
Dave Nicholson: No, no, no.
Keith Townsend: We’re not going to do any of that. The reality is, Brad, people have to get work done. They have to move forward. Businesses make decisions for all the right economical factors for their businesses. VMware-Broadcom has made decisions. But you’re on the ground. You have to deal with… What is the VMUG membership rank? Like how many thousands?
Brad Tompkins: We have over 150,000 members across the globe. And yeah, a lot of them are, I think it’s fair to say, upset. I think a lot of them are confused. A lot of them are very anxious about what’s potentially coming down the road for them as their ELAs start to end. There’s a lot of FUD out there, and we’re doing our best to get the right content out to our members so then they can make the business decisions that they’re going to have to make. And we talk about in IT, there’s always a catalyst that has to happen to get people to move or to get people to really stay firm with the direction they’re going or whatever.
No question, this is the biggest catalyst that I’ve been involved in, and I’ve been doing IT for 20, 30 years. So, it is interesting out there, and a lot of people are just trying to find their way. The good news here is they are upset because they’re so passionate about the product. And so many people have built their careers on VMware. And I hear this story all the time. “I got involved in virtualization,” or, “Ten years ago, there was a project virtualization project and I took it on,” and now they’re doing these great things and their career has blossomed and those kinds of things. So it’s great that we have the passion, but VMUG is here to help people navigate through what the changes are going to be for them.
Dave Nicholson: Wait, these are engineers we’re talking about here. This is not an Oprah Winfrey audience we’re talking about. Because you talk about passion.
Brad Tompkins: Yes.
Dave Nicholson: You talk about the commitment. That’s kind of something we want to explore, is the rational side of these folks who are clearly… You know, these are computer scientists, these are rational people. Versus the real emotion. Feeling betrayal, abandonment, whatever it is. Dive into that. How much of it is reasonable that’s going on versus a natural reaction to the unknown? What do you think?
Brad Tompkins: In the beginning, it was mostly emotion, and it was like, “They are changing VMware and it’s not going to be the same VMware,” which it isn’t. But it got down to, “Where are the turtle’s going to be?” Right? I mean, that’s the level that we got to.
Dave Nicholson: Yes, it did.
Keith Townsend: For people who don’t know, at the now Broadcom-
Brad Tompkins: Where’s Rosie?
Keith Townsend: … at the now Broadcom campus, there’s this thing around turtles. The turtle is the mascot of the VMware community. And there was a family of turtles in the pond, and one of Hock Tan’s first things when he visited the campus was, “Who’s responsible for the turtles?”
Dave Nicholson: Turtles with their own social media profiles, I might add.
Brad Tompkins: That’s right. So yeah, no more turtles and lots of changes on campus. But now I think it’s shifting to, “Okay, this is my new reality and what do I want to do?” And candidly, we do have members that are like, “I’m going to look at competitors. I want to look at other hypervisors.” And VMUG’s mission is for our members to get the most out of VMware and partner solutions, but we’re not making that decision for them. That’s a decision that they need to make. It’s a business decision. And look, analysts say this, I even heard Broadcom say this, they know a certain amount of people are going to go somewhere else.
And you know what? VMUG will still be here for them, because we have the partner solutions piece of this. Maybe they’re interested in other solutions that we’re going to bring to our UserCons and bring to our members that can work on any kind of hypervisor. So it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to leave VMUG. But what we’re trying to do also is to help people navigate this in a couple different ways. One, if you are in a situation where you’re going to buy VCF, you got to get the most out of it. You’ve got to look at, what can I displace from a third party that’s now built into VCF?
I mean, that’s just the way it is with anything. I mean, you think about Microsoft 365, right? There’s so many different applications in there, but most people are using Word, PowerPoint, email. But if you want start using some of the other ones, you’re going to extract more value. Same thing with VCF. So we want to really shift that conversation that we used to have in the past about, “Hey, you need to learn about vSAN because you might need to use it. You need to learn about VCF because you might need to deploy your SDDC.” Now it’s, “You’ve already got it, so let us help you get the most out of it.”
Keith Townsend: Whether you want it or not, it’s there.
Brad Tompkins: That’s right.
Keith Townsend: I’ve experienced this for my entire career. I am one of those people and I’m making no qualms about it. I was emotional when the transaction happened. I cut my teeth when vSphere… Not my teeth, but my virtualization teeth. I’ve been a big part of the VMware user community. The EPIC2 value system that the previous management system had in place, people felt… It’s this unreasonable emotion. It’s kind of how I felt when Novell network went away. That-
Dave Nicholson: I don’t know. I never heard of that. I’m not that old. I’m not that old, Keith.
Keith Townsend: Obviously, that’s not one of the things that your folks at the cohort are talking about. They don’t bring up much NetWare at this piece. But this is something, Brad, that me and you have talked about for years. We’ve known each other for well over 10 years now. And one of the conversations around the VMware community is everyone needs to learn cloud. Everyone needs to learn how to code. Everyone needs to expand their careers in different ways. And vSphere has been resilient. So talk to me about that resiliency, even through these changes. As users, what are you hearing from users as they are exploring other options? Where’s that resiliency of vSphere these days?
Brad Tompkins: Well, this is where the emotion gets put aside and reality sets in, and they’re like, “There is no substitute for vSphere.” I mean, it is the best out there. Yes, you might be paying a little bit more of a premium for it, but it goes back to where do you want to have your expertise? You’ve already got people on your staff that know vSphere, been doing it for years, decades even. And to go learn something new, is that really the best choice? Is that really where you want to spend your time doing that? When you’ve got things like AI and you’ve got all these other initiatives out there that should be driving the business, who your hypervisor is… Yes, you need one, but that’s not going to necessarily be the business differentiator that’s going to take your business to the next level. So whatever you have, whatever the incumbent, and it happens to be the best, why make that move?
So, the conversation now after people’s emotion have set aside is like, “Okay, how do I make this work in my budget in the new world?” So I’ve talked to some members that like, “We were going down the path of a different hypervisor. Now we realize, okay, if we reduce some of our servers, maybe even take out some processors, now we get that license to where it doesn’t cost as much and it fits in our budget and we can continue with vSphere,” and they were excited about that. They were like, “This is great.” And you know, you do have VCF, but you also have VVF. So our members… In fact, we’ve got webinars going on right now learning about VVF. So that’s a lighter version of VCF, obviously, and people are finding that to fit them really well. And then when they’re ready, they can move on up.
But one thing our members have been telling us for years is they want to move up the stack. They know that just vSphere alone is not going to be the career accelerator it was the past decade. Just vSphere alone in the next decade isn’t going to do it. You have to do more. And that obviously is storage networking, it’s the full SDDC. Then you got AI. That’s another workload that’s going to be driving things and driving what the new data centers are of the future. I love the message here at Dell Tech World about the AI factories.
That’s where people need to get excited about and look at what do we need to make those AI factories. It’s that message back to on-prem. And our members, most of them, they grew up on-prem. We call them server huggers. They want that stuff to be here. They don’t necessarily want things in the cloud. Repatriation is happening. People are realizing that cloud can get expensive. And look, there’s a piece for cloud. It’s going to be a hybrid solution. And so there’s a place for everything. But it’s about where’s the best place to put the workload. And a lot of workloads just work better on-prem.
Dave Nicholson: So, it’s interesting you mentioned AI, and of course we hear AI everywhere. And if someone were to come from another planet and land here, they would assume that 97.65% of all IT is AI, AI, AI. The one thing that I’ve liked about this AI discussion, being a knuckle-dragging infrastructure guy for so long, is that it’s refocused our lenses on infrastructure.
Brad Tompkins: Yes.
Dave Nicholson: Both software infrastructure and hardware infrastructure. And it’s interesting because we’re here talking with folks in the kind of extended Solidigm ecosystem of partners. And you start talking about caring about the way that storage devices interact with that environment. A couple of years ago, it would be unfashionable to raise your hand and say, “I’m in the business of managing infrastructure.” I don’t care if it’s software infrastructure from VMware, it’s infrastructure.
The point is it was fashionable for people to say, “I don’t care how it gets done, I just want to write a check and get a service.” Well, there are a lot of efficiencies to be had refocusing on this. So, maybe AI and maybe this whole thing with Broadcom and VMware is a blessing in disguise for your users, your user group, because it gives attention to those folks who have been overlooked for a period of time. Am I being… There’s a question behind my rant here. Am I being overly optimistic or do you see possibly a resurgence in the respectability that these folks deserve?
Brad Tompkins: I’m definitely seeing it. I mean, infrastructure is cool again, right? And that’s something that, you know, if you think about-
Dave Nicholson: So you agree.
Brad Tompkins: I do. I do. And a couple of years ago, it was all about the coder and those kind of things, and now you hear on the main stage, “Oh yeah, your code’s going to get developed by AI.” You know what I mean? So those are the folks that might be on the outside looking in, and it’s going to be the infrastructure folks that are really driving that.
Dave Nicholson: Until the robots show up.
Keith Townsend: Until the robots show up. Speaking of robots, people still need to cable up stuff. People still need to put disk inside of servers. They need to replace disk. They need to understand what CPU, what GPU to use. A big part of the VMUG mission is educating the next generation of vAdmins, whatever that V means. How are folks going about that training or self-training?
Brad Tompkins: Well, there’s a couple different ways that they’re doing it. One is VMUG Advantage. VMUG membership is free, so we encourage everybody to do that. But if you want a higher level, you can do VMUG Advantage. And one of the big things that you get out of that is eval experience, where you have nearly all the VMware software that you can download and use. In a home lab only, not for production. But that way, you can really start cutting your teeth on everything. You can download VCF, you can download NSX-T and all that kind of stuff, and start using that.
The other thing is Hands-on Labs. That’s a big piece of it too. And there’s tons of Hands-on Lab out there that people can get experience with. NSX takes a good bit of horsepower, so if you don’t have a William Lam type home lab at home, Hands-on Labs can really help out because you’re able to log in and get some of that experience and play around with it. And it is in a format where you can break it and learn from that. And that’s what people want. They want to be able to break something and then fix it. That’s how a lot of people learn. And so those are a couple different ways that people are doing that. As well as attending VMUGs and hearing keynotes and talking to vendors about, “Hey, what can I do to learn more and test things out?”
Keith Townsend: So, I’m going to end on a little bit of home lab candy. Imagine you have an Intel NUC. We know the size of an Intel NUC. It’s not a very big device, maybe about that big. And you put one of these Solidigm 61.44 terabyte SSDs into one of these devices. Imagine what would a home lab geek like a William Lam do with something like that?
Brad Tompkins: Oh my goodness. There’s probably be a lot, but we call it Plex ops, you know, the Plex Media Server.
Keith Townsend: Yes. I was hoping you were going to go there.
Brad Tompkins: That’s where that went.
Keith Townsend: I’m not going to out any of my Plex friends out there, but they have some serious like half a petabyte Plex libraries.
Brad Tompkins: Yes, absolutely. So I think that would be what could consume a good bit of that. So good stuff there. And who knows, maybe a LLM on it as well.
Keith Townsend: So Brad, as always, I always enjoy these conversations, especially now post Dell, EMC, who’s ever owned VMware in the past 20 years has changed hands. They were independent for a hot, what, three months maybe. It does go to show the value of the stack. Customers that I talk to really do want to stay on the platform. It’s trusted. They have 150,000 resources within the VMUG community to go out and hire skills. It has been a huge foundation. So this was a very important conversation. We thank you for joining us on The Six Five Live on behalf of me and my co-host, Dave Nicholson. Stay tuned for more coverage brought to you by Solidigm.
Author Information
David Nicholson is Chief Research Officer at The Futurum Group, a host and contributor for Six Five Media, and an Instructor and Success Coach at Wharton’s CTO and Digital Transformation academies, out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business’s Arresty Institute for Executive Education.
David interprets the world of Information Technology from the perspective of a Chief Technology Officer mindset, answering the question, “How is the latest technology best leveraged in service of an organization’s mission?” This is the subject of much of his advisory work with clients, as well as his academic focus.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, David held technical leadership positions at EMC, Oracle, and Dell. He is also the founder of DNA Consulting, providing actionable insights to a wide variety of clients seeking to better understand the intersection of technology and business.
Keith Townsend is a technology management consultant with more than 20 years of related experience in designing, implementing, and managing data center technologies. His areas of expertise include virtualization, networking, and storage solutions for Fortune 500 organizations. He holds a BA in computing and an MS in information technology from DePaul University. He is the President of the CTO Advisor, part of The Futurum Group.
