VMware by Broadcom blinks again – this time easing change for cloud service providers
As the rumor mill whispers about a breakup with AWS
VMware by Broadcom has made some fresh concessions to its cloud service provider community – and the customers who rely on it.
As reported by The Register in March, not all members of VMware's Cloud Services Provider (VCSP) program were invited to continue. Those dropped as VCSP members were instead offered the chance to acquire white label services from remaining participants in the program, with a tight deadline to sort out those new arrangements.
In mid-April, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan promised an extended period of "modified monthly billing arrangements until the white label offers are available."
Now VMware's veep for partners and advanced solutions sales, Ahmar Mohammad, has offered more detail on the arrangements.
His post reveals that all existing VCSP premier tier members will retain that status, and that special exemptions may be granted to "partners not yet signed up for the program and that may have unique regulatory constraints or country specific sovereign data requirements (example: European Economic Area and United Kingdom)."
That sounds a lot like a concession to Eurocloud lobby CISPE, which has strongly criticized Broadcom and called for a European Commission probe into the acquisitive giant's takeover of VMware.
Another big change sees partners that exited the VCSP program allowed to continue operating their cloud services until the end of April 2025. Such partners – some of whom did not choose to exit the program but were shown the door – previously faced the prospect of immediately closing their clouds and/or signing up to resell white label services.
The sudden migrations necessitated by that change were obviously not easily achieved. Now cloud providers that quit VMware – and their customers – have a year to sort things out.
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Another change means VCSP partners have an extra month to seek an exemption that will let them continue in the program, or sign up for white label services from another partner. That's not a huge amount of extra time but, again, will offer some relief to what was previously a very short deadline to make changes. Some new classes of partners are also allowed to become white label providers.
Losing the biggest cloud of all
Other VMware customers, however, have a new partner-related issue to worry about. Rumors are circulating that Amazon Web Services' VMware service is going away.
Multiple social media posts from recent days indicate that VMware Cloud on AWS will be discontinued. The change will mean sales cease as of May 1, but the service will remain available.
VMware Cloud on AWS saw the two brands jointly engineer a solution that saw VMware's stack run in the AWS cloud as a managed service. The service allowed construction of hybrid clouds, or could run the vStack as a pure-play cloud service.
At launch, VMware enthused about its presence in the world's dominant cloud and cited AWS's interest in running the service as recognition of its tech as a foundation for hybrid clouds.
The Register is aware that the service had its problems as hosts may have been a little underpowered. Even so, VMC on AWS remained VMware's trophy.
If it is indeed going to end, VMware has a lot of explaining to do.
Two other factors need to be considered here. One is that Broadcom and Google recently became BFFs. The former announced it was "moving the company's VMware workloads to Google Cloud – including customer-facing products and services as well as internal services."
This shift may have left little room for VMC on AWS to survive.
The other is that VMC on AWS isn't based on VMware Cloud Foundation, the bundle of products that Broadcom has made its lead offering.
We've asked VMware for comment and were told it had "nothing to report." AWS hasn't responded to our queries at the time of writing. You know the drill – if we hear something, we'll write more stuff. ®