Introduction

The FTC continues to drag its feet on approving Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Ironically, in our view, these delays only hurt the very competitive environment the FTC claims to be protecting. The AI era is accelerating at a breakneck pace and the big 3 hyperscale cloud vendors already have a sizable lead on legacy incumbents. If preserving competition is truly the agenda of the U.S. government, it should recognize that VMware, its enterprise ecosystem and market forces have the potential to neutralize cross cloud complexity and give customers a viable alternative to increasingly powerful public cloud players. 

In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of VMWare Explore 2023, we revisit our views on Broadcom’s rationale and likely actions post acquisition. We’ll share current ETR survey data to place VMware’s position in context to the major cloud players, speculate on its AI agenda and give a preview of next week’s VMware Explore. To do so we welcome CUBE analyst Rob Strechay and friend of theCUBE, Zeus Kerravala, principal of ZK Research. 

EU Commission approves Broadcom VMware

https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/financial-releases/61306#:~:text=SAN%20JOSE%2C%20Calif.%20%2C%20July,(NYSE%3A%20VMW)

Hock Tan blog post on VMware’s future:

https://www.broadcom.com/blog/keeping-customers-at-the-center-of-everything

Broadcom VMware Deck:

https://investors.broadcom.com/static-files/232c0cd2-02d9-4704-bb7b-5659cef67fae

Silverlingings article on VMware Broadcom’s slow progress:

https://www.silverliningsinfo.com/multi-cloud/broadcoms-61b-vmware-deal-slowly-makes-progress

Broadcom VMware merger will hatch a new Supercloud:

https://www.silverliningsinfo.com/multi-cloud/broadcom-vmware-merger-will-hatch-new-supercloud

FT interview with Hock Tan:

https://www.ft.com/content/0a4013b6-b3b9-49fd-87a9-bd0da5e229b1