I respectfully disagree; VMware was dying regardless. No doubt bcom hastened its demise—I’ll grant you that—but vsphere was essentially feature complete as far back as 6.7. There was utterly nothing interesting or necessary about v7, and whatever hope they had of getting customers to use VMware for kubernetes was killed the moment VMware decided to charge separately for the privilege. Even less is interesting about v8. In other words essentially the only motivation customers have to pay for subscriptions is for support entitlement. That’s a very dangerous place for a software company to be, all the worse when there are several perfectly viable alternatives that cost a lot less.
vsphere 9 will be interesting if they make NVMe tiering generally available but I won’t be at all surprised to see VMware make that a paid add-on. Other than that I’m not aware of anything on the roadmap that I’d consider compelling.
vrealize automation is a pig, and let’s be honest that only a unicorn uses vra without also using vsphere.
Vrops is good but again nobody is using it if they aren’t also using vsphere.
horizon is great but has no technical dependency on vsphere, which I would guess is the primary reason bcom divested it.
HCX is freaking awesome but its dependency on NSX (which is also very cool) makes it expensive, and NSX dependency on vsphere means VMware can’t grow its customer base even for products that are genuinely worth buying.
By organizing its products as a walled garden even as competitors released excellent a la carte alternatives, VMware signed its own death warrant years ago.
bcom or no bcom, VMware wasnt