back to article Worried by VMware's executive exodus? Dell should be

“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune,” Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said, before adding “to lose both looks like carelessness.” What, then, to say of VMware? In recent weeks has lost a chief financial officer Johnathan Chadwick, the brains behind its NSX network virtualisation product Martin Casado, and now …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    um

    "VMware admitted it couldn't match rivals' spending power, but still aimed high. And failed."

    No, they WERE high and couldn't execute, so they failed. Running a "cloud" that has updates nearly every day and some days with multiple updates that lock people out of the management console, for the unknown duration of the update, is simply poor execution from architectural planning to operations. VirtuStream has been running enterprise applications for years and probably took one look at the VMWare cloud catastrophe and said " no thanks." Verizon banked on the VMWare architecture as well and look how far it got them. VMWare is in a very bad spot. They are losing precious cloud time as everyone else pulls further out front and they can't keep the thing running so they just keep falling farther behind, yet they can't throw in the towel like HP because they have talked too much shite , plus the entire cloud operation is probably bleeding large sums of money because it isn't really enterprise grade. Who really trusts it? It must be a pickle, mire, jam,mess of grand proportions. Hey, what they should do is raise prices on existing on-premises customers to help pay for fixing the cloud mess.. yeah, that will work.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: um

      But VMware doesn't believe that they have a problem, so to suggest fixing anything is blasphemy. Their software, in their own minds, is unimpeachable. Much like Microsoft's ardent belief that System Center is something other than a cybersexually transmitted disease.

      VMware gauges themselves against System Center. Microsoft gauges System Center against VMware. Both of them are trapped in the fucking past, with software that was miserable to install, manage and maintain 10 years ago, let alone when you compare it to modern "cloud" user experiences.

      Microsoft can be partially excused due to largesse. They really do have a massively captive user base. VMware does not. There are valid, viable alternatives to VMware today, and by the time VMware figures that out, they'll already be in the grave.

      Some companies just can't harness enough humility to reach the escape velocity of their own hubris.

    2. TheVogon

      Re: um

      "being taken over by Dell was not entirely predictable"

      VMware have not been taken over by Dell. They are a separate company from EMC, and EMC don't own all of it!

      "They really do have a massively captive user base. VMware does not."

      In the hypervisor space VMware have a larger captive audience than Microsoft. However they can't compete with free - Hyper-V Server costs nothing to license.

      Also VMware are not executing well in the off-the-shelf hybrid cloud space - whereas Microsoft are

      growing market share versus VMware and AWS with Azure + Hyper-V.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This is a little odd. You would expect the EMC executives to be running for the exits, but not VMware.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      VMware execs jumping ship isn't surprising. With the rapid devaluation of the VMware stocks as a result of the takeover their 'golden handcuffs' in the form of options have effectively been removed.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Good point. Maybe those stock options don't look as solid as they once did.

        You would think that Dell would want to keep the Chinese wall that EMC (sort of) had with VMware standing, which is why I assume they will keep VMware intact as an organization and not meld them into some large Dell/EMC org... if they try to make VMware explicitly, or implicitly but obviously, a Dell/EMC thing, Microsoft is going to get a wind fall of VMware refugees. VMware is very much in flux right now. Who knows what is going to happen. There probably are not too many superstars who want to just sit around for a year to see what Dell has in store for them. I always thought that was a huge risk with this long timeframe to acquisition, a year plus before the transaction is even complete... EMC's assets could just fall away due to attrition and customers could leave due to uncertainty around... well everything.

  3. Hawkeye Pierce

    OT: Oscar Wilde

    May be off-topic, but you started it..

    Oscar Wilde can hardly be "reputed to have said" that "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” when it's one of the most famous quotes from his play The Importance of Being Earnest.

    Tsk, youngsters today...

    1. Dan Wilkie

      Re: OT: Oscar Wilde

      They found me in a handbag.

      I was in the importance of being earnest in Drama at school...

      I wasn't very good.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: OT: Oscar Wilde

      Definitely. Come on, El Reg. This is supposed to be a high brow English website. I expect properly cited literary references and phallic innuendos.

  4. Crazy Operations Guy

    Execs leaving doesn't really matter

    Having C-level employees leave in a merger is perfectly normal since those position already exist in the parent org. Besides, positions like are usually just filled with people that were once useful, so had iron-clad contracts, but have since just failed upwards where they can't do much harm. Now that their jobs are up for re-evaluation, they would probably feel that its a good time to deploy their Golden Parachutes and go somewhere else.

    As for a product designer, they probably just wanted to go find a new challenge, and there is a lot of uncertainty and stress during a merger like this, so I wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to avoid it.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What's incredible is that Carl Eschenbach wasn't fired last year when VMware settled the $75 million whistle-blower GSA lawsuit. If you read the suit, you will see just how deep Eschenbach was involved. The media, including The Register, completely missed this connection. VMware isn't going to miss Eschenbach despite their pleasant separation:

    Link to lawsuit (PDF) - http://bit.ly/21ODzgj

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