I have been here for almost 10 years and of course I am worried about what will happen next. If things don't work out, I hope that I will manage to get some better opportunity elsewhere. For me, the announcement about the acquisition was quite expected, somehow I knew it would come. I was discussing it with some colleagues but I'm wondering what's your opinion, what were the wrong moves that led to this?
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For the reasons listed by others, the bottom line for the acquisition is that VMW's revenue growth is in low single digits, costs are high - acquisitions plus internal dev efforts have not been able to keep revenue growth in the double digit/teens. Combine that with market downturn (lower valuation YTD) gave Bcom (which appears to behave like a private equity) an opportunity to make a bid and post-acquisition optimize for costs..I expected VMW to be acquired by one of the Hyperscalers, but not by Bcom!!
Though I think the acquisitions were interesting, the fault has been on the poor integration of the BUs, each BU worked as a separate entity, as a franchise, the ONE VMware message has been just a gimmick.
The integration between BUs, the needless complexity in some of our product upgrades/integrations, quality control/testing of software.
Most of these aren't news and have been getting flagged up internally for years (a certain post from socialcast springs to mind). The management should have been on top of this years ago and have been sleeping at the wheel.
The bad ideas of management did it and yet they get tens of millions in payout for the acquisition. Good job if you can get it. Fail upward!
Maybe rahgoo should donate his extra change in control $50M bonus to (soon to be former) employees that need the $ to help get by…. That would be $2,500 per person if they cut 20,000 people.
Management in charge didn't do anything to accept or fix the issues that they were specifically told about.
A lot of the problems were hidden because the person lower down the ladder blew rosy sunshine up the fundament of the next person up the ladder. The person at higher levels in the ladder had no curiosity to check the veracity of the reports they were getting.
What will happen to Workspace ONE/Airwatch? Will it be sold?
Carbon Black (loosing money - hopefully octane sells this)
Tanzu (everything)
Pivotal
Wavefront
.....list goes on.
One wrong approach implemented consistently over a decade. Hiring B-grade leaders who will supress As, and A-grade leaders who will supress the A+s. Seen it in action consistently. We've lived for too long on income from our core products and stifled innovation because some of us shone too brightly for comfort. There is no way to recover from this disease except for the clinical cleaning that Octane will bring. I might get hit in the process too because he might just cut numbers ruthlessly.
what was wrong about tanzu
Why does there have to be wrong moves? I'm not saying there weren't but the reality here is Michael Dell wanted to sell the business and Broadcom wanted to buy it. Broadcom offered a fair price for the business and the board and majority shareholders approved it.
That being said there's a lot of fat in this company and definitely a number of hindsight bad calls that have been made. We could debate them but it won't change anything.
Tanzu
No integration of BUs
No innovation