back to article There's no shame in VMware quitting the public cloud

VMware quitting the public cloud by selling vCloud Air to OVH looks like failure, but is the best possible sort of failure because the company still has excellent prospects to turn a quid from the cloud, without having to operate one. Which is not to say that VMware is out of the woods. It clearly thought it could run a public …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Too little too late

    Being limited to only IaaS is only one step above managed hosting which isn't where customers are going. Throw into the mix VMware's uncertain product strategy around Cloud (is it vCloud, vRA, straight vSphere on AWS) and you can see why this was doomed to fail.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Too little too late

      Must admit i have no sympathy for VMWare on this. As a longtime customer, I've gone from VMWare delivering value added features into vSphere, to acting like drug dealers and treating customers as cash cows.

      1. Doogie Howser MD

        Re: Too little too late

        Maybe they just got cocky and complacent and assumed if they built it, people would come. It has happened to tech titans before and will happen again. Like has already been said, public/hybrid cloud these days is so much more than just IaaS. It's complicated services commoditised, such as data warehousing and video transcoding, as an example.

        That just isn't a stream VMware wanted to fish in.

        1. MyffyW Silver badge

          Capital

          "Build it and they will come" is a great strap-line for a feel good film but not the soundest advice when said effort involves effing-great-big data centres and an imperial ton of servers.

          How do you make a small fortune in hosting? Start out with a large fortune.

  2. Noonoot

    When the going gets tough, the tough are no longer tough and chicken out

  3. thondwe

    Rebrand

    They've sold vCloud Air - suprised they didn't take another opportunity to rebrand it, they seem to do that with everything else...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good thing they got out,

    because frankly, they really sucked at running it. All you had to do was watch "unscheduled maintenance" event after event, often impacting the management console so you couldn't even turn on a VM until the issue was fixed. Sure hope OVH knows what they bought - I suspect buyer's remorse shortly if they didn't get a "fire sale" price - and perhaps even if they did.

    1. Captain Scarlet

      Re: Good thing they got out,

      I bet OVH do, the hardware which is old will likely be slapped on their Kimsufi brand.

  5. returnofthemus

    No Shame at all

    Especially, when your CEO declares war on a bookseller, then climbs into the bookseller's bed, though at the same time you have to wonder what OVH has just bought???

    Whilst I thought HP might have made a go of things especially after the Eucaplyptus acquisition, I have no simpathy whatsoever with anyone that bought into that Cisco 'InterCloud" bollox!

  6. GingerOne

    A good move from VMWare. The cloud will burst soon and when it does and buinesses start realising they had their own private, secure clouds in their data centres all along so VMWare stocks will start rising massively.

    1. Sir Sham Cad

      Re: private, secure clouds

      Which is great if you have N+1 data centres. If you have one DC then a cloudy alternative could be very useful for resilience. I'm pissed off that I can't now play with VCloud Air but I guess I'll need to be patient for VCloud Bezos.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pivotal

    Why VMware doesn't buy the rest of Pivotal business?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No

    Was this puff piece for VMware paid for or something? No, really, no shame at all in leaving customers in the lurch and changing strategies for mission critical infrastructure at will. Their sales reps were probably selling vCloud Air just last week, but there is no shame in that right? Misleading customers and prospects right up until you get out but execs have known they were getting out of the cloud business for months because deals like this aren't done the same day they are announced. No, there is shame unless you tell people you are just trying out public cloud to see if we can make money but let customers know you may get out of it at any time. HP Helion was the same way - shameful. Look at us, buy our shitty cloud, we're in this for the long haul with you, our valued customers and partners. I think most folks would agree that bullshit is shameful. Puff piece fail.

    1. ssharwood

      Re: No

      Can we please put this 'The Reg slips in paid puff pieces' thing to bed? Because we don't. Ever.

      I'll be outta here and driving an Uber if we do under my byline or any other.

      You also seem to have missed the bits where I say VMware has weak and confusing products. Who would pay for that?

      To your point of closing services being shameful, vendors are businesses. Of course they start with ShinyHappy. And of course they run like hell if the money doesn't flow. Would you rather they persist with duds forever? Would your pension fund?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: No

        Awesome display of naiveté there. And I'm not buying this pious nonsense that you are trying to sell.

        1. Do you mean to say that in the history of The Register not a single article was written to help promote an advertiser, or friend in a particular company, or to promote a specific technology for monetary or awareness gain? DevOps event anyone? Pure and unadulterated rubbish or a serious flight into fantasy land.

        2. Have you ever been a product manager of a $100 million to $1 Billion, global, mission critical infrastructure product? Most everyone involved internally with what VMware did was either embarrassed and/or ashamed by changing course so quickly and screwing their customers like that. So, if any of them are ashamed, I'm going to make the safe statement that it was shameful. Mission critical infrastructure that people invest significant time, resources and sums of money to adopt is different than the reg changing their site banner and layout. If you haven't sat in the captains chair, then you are only guessing what it must be like at that scale. And I can tell you they don't make those decisions lightly because there is so much at stake - Internal R&D, Operations, marketing and sales, partners, loyal customers and the hole that they gave competitors to drive through all have to be examined and weighed. Then there is the PR side where the non-puff piece tried to paint their decision in a light that made it look like no big deal, because hey, others have done it too. If I am a cio that VMware convinced to bet my current and future infrastructure on something they said was their long term strategy, and I invest significant resources to turn my ship to align with that strategy, I don't give a rats ass about what HP did with Helion, And the comparison by the reg to minimize the severity of what is really happening here looks either somehwat naïve or covering for a key advertiser. Just sayin.

  9. Griffo

    It was much harder than they thought

    I was running a Vmware based IaaS cloud back before vCloud Air, or VCHS even existed. Back then as a partner, VMWare used to always try to convince us how awesome vCloud DIrector was, and we used to always complain about how crap it was, how it didn't integrate well into their other products, and the 1000 missing features that made it useless for a real hoster.

    I remember the PAC I was on when they admitted that they were getting into the business of hosting, and that they'd discovered that their software really needed a lot of work in order to be of provider-standard. In fact the way they termed it was that the development of DIrector and related components had been moved to a whole new development team focused purely on hosting. In other words, they discovered what we had been telling them for years was true.

    I think part of the problem was they could never quite get the architecture of their stack reworked well enough to suite the hyper-scale environment they needed to compete. Always lots of great stories, always lacking in key required feature areas. So this is as much an admission that their software is not suitabel for hyper-scale as it is an admission they couldn't turn a profit.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why wait for VMware on the Public Cloud, its available now ?

    There is no need to wait for VMware to fire up on AWS, IBM's cloud has VMware available today with near 1 touch migration tools to make moving VMware workload to public Cloud easier than any other cloud vendor.

    An interested party.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why wait for VMware on the Public Cloud, its available now ?

      Yeah but.... IBM

      I'd rather pleasure myself with an angle grinder.

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