In early 2024, we sat down with StorMagic’s Chief Revenue Officer, Brian Grainger, and PBG Networks’ Director of Professional Services, Paul Wozniak to discuss Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and the upheaval that it may cause for VMware users and partners alike.
Long-time StorMagic partners, Paul talks about PBG Networks’ experiences with StorMagic, and most importantly, what they advise VMware partners to do to protect their business and relationship with their customers going forward.
This blog captures some of the thoughts during that conversation with Paul and Brian, with the full recording available at the bottom of the page.
vSAN and VMware product updates:
Broadcom’s simplification of VMware’s product line, and their focus on larger customers, makes sense from a business standpoint. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not hurting the many SMBs and enterprise edge accounts that make up a good portion of their customer base.
According to Brian, the problem with this lies in the fact that these customers don’t want to be handcuffed to overprovisioning. Spending time speaking to a number of customers in Europe, the UK, and the US, he reports on Broadcom’s recent price increase:
“We’re seeing anywhere from a 30% to a 300% increase in cost for the identical infrastructure”
Adding to Brian’s earlier point, Paul noted that when it comes to those with tighter budgets, like companies with edge computing use cases, pricing is really the concern.
He continues: “These budgets are a lot of times set ahead of time, so having to accommodate a large price increase can be very difficult.”
For VMware vSAN license holders who felt they can stay on the license version they have, Paul warns:
“We have already seen cease and desist letters sent out to clients saying if you don’t renew your support, you must destroy your perpetual license. So for clients who thought they had a safe haven there, that is also not an option.”
“For Broadcom, that is their M.O.”
“They are looking for their largest clients to make the money. They’re looking for partners to bring in other large clients. And if you’re small, you’re kind of left to the winds… We know Broadcom will make sure to take care of their enterprise customers because they’re in the business to make money. And they’re good at it”.
How will the Broadcom’s VMware acquisition impact SMB and enterprise-edge customers?
Given Broadcom’s behavior with past acquisitions, Paul hypothesizes that maintaining the same price for VMware products doesn’t seem likely.
“All the conversations we’ve had with clients and partners, they are expecting it.” the Professional Services Director comments. “The question is where will that price increase fall? Is it still feasible for me to maintain my environment at that price, or am I forced to look for alternatives because the new subscription pricing model has priced me out?”
Advice for new and existing channel partners:
It’s no secret that this is a period of uncertainty for customers and the channel alike. Now more than ever it’s important to have a solid strategy to enable you to capitalize on what’s happening with Broadcom. When speaking to clients at PBG Networks, Paul stated that his team uses the products that they sell.
“When we talk to clients, we show them our environment running on the solutions that we are selling so we can really put our name behind it. We can share the successful experiences other clients have had dealing with the same challenges. You’d be surprised what you can run even with just two hosts and SvSAN as the virtual SAN solution. So if you’re a channel partner but only use the very small edge deployments, for example, in the retail vertical, we encourage you to discuss with your team to see what can be done.”
“Those are conversations that we have internally at PBG Networks all the time throughout the year.”
Additionally, Paul advises partners to have conversations with their clients too.
“More than once, we’ve had good ideas come from our clients. It’s always good to ask ‘What are your peers doing in the industry?’. You’d be surprised how much networking some of those clients do with their own peers as well.”
From a StorMagic perspective, Brian adds, “When you have a customer that is saying, ‘Hey, what are my options’, or ‘How would you do this?’, bring our pre-sales technical engineers into the discussion. We see all the hypervisors and HCI solutions that are out there. So I think we can be a benefit to you when having those conversations.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom:
Even if an existing vSphere Standard or Essential Plus customer is being threatened with cease and desist letters from Broadcom, if they are running vSAN, they can move away but still retain the hypervisor, says Brian.
He continues “vSphere will cost them more money, but they can still stay with the Standard or Essentials Plus and migrate over to StorMagic. When you compare both stacks apples to apples from a pricing standpoint, we still come in significantly less expensive. So there are lots of great options out there for channel partners and for customers to look at”.
Switch to StorMagic’s CRN Five-Star-Rated Program
Led by four-years-in-a-row CRN-listed Channel Chief Brian Grainger who has managed and run channel programs for almost three decades, we have a pretty firm hold on vendor expectations, and what needs to happen to keep our partners and their bottom line happy.
Which is probably why we’ve been awarded a 5-Star rating by CRN in their Partner Program Guide, six years in a row!
When speaking about his strategy for the channel Brian notes: “I think we [StorMagic] check all the boxes. First and foremost, we have a historical record of a consistent go-to-market strategy. We are 100% channel. My team doesn’t play games with end-user accounts. When a channel partner brings us an opportunity, we are going to live and die with that opportunity”
Not only that, being all about enterprise-class high availability, switching your vSAN customers over to StorMagic SvSAN also benefits them too.
To discover more about StorMagic’s recent five-star-rated program, visit our Partner Page. Or to listen to the full conversation between Paul and Brian, which was hosted by StorMagic Chief Marketing Officer, Bruce Kornfeld, hit play on the video below.
