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VMware (VMW) had a bad week last week. First, a  jury in the U.S. federal district court for the District of Delaware ruled that the virtualization giant infringed on two patents owned by Densify. Densify is a Toronto-based startup that makes cloud and container resource management software. The ruling will cost VMware about $237 million dollars. Of course, VMware will appeal.

In an emailed statement, to sdxcentral VMware wrote, “VMware intend[s] to vigorously pursue all legal remedies that are available to us to prove that we are not liable here.”

Next, it was announced that over 200 VMware employees will lose their jobs as part of a “workforce rebalancing.” TargetTech noted that IBM has historically used the same term to describe its periodic layoffs.

In addition to workers losing their jobs, the VMware executive suite has undergone purging too. Reports are that

• Chief Customer Officer Scott Bajtos, an 11-year VMware veteran who oversaw VMware’s global services team which includes customer success, technical support, professional services support, and customer advocacy.
• Mark Ritacco, VP of operations and customer intelligence, after almost 11 years,
• Kate Woodcock, VP of customer advocacy, after almost eight years.
• Scott Bajtos – global chief customer officer, is leaving after 11 years.
• Alexa Erjavic, senior director of global services strategy.

VMware acquisitions

Could it be buyer’s regret? Not even cutting a handful of executive salaries can cover the billions VMware has spent on acquisitions over the past 2 years.

In 2018 VMware bought:

• E8 Security for machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for cybersecurity intelligence and analytics.
• CloudCoreo to manage cloud configurations and identify risks when deploying public clouds to prevent breaches and compliance violations.
• EMC Service Assurance Suite for monitoring telco network health, performance, and root cause analysis.
• CloudHeath for multi-cloud management platform across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for $500 million.
• Heptio VMware plans to use Heptio assets to enhance Kubernetes life-cycle management $550 million.

In 2019 VMware bought:

• AetherPal for remote IT support software to remotely view, control, troubleshoot, and fix devices and applications.
• BitFusion to support Artificial Intelligence and machine learning-based workloads on graphics processor units (GPUs) (no acquisition price announced).
• Uhana for 5G mobile network optimization.
• Intrinsic for secure serverless functions on AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Bitnami brings simplified app development with a curated marketplace for VMware customers.
• Veriflow for network monitoring software for multi-cloud management.
• Avi Networks for multi-cloud application delivery to enhance performance, resource utilization, automation, and scalability.
• Pivotal for multi-cloud application software strategy across AWS, Azure & GCP for $2.7 billion. and;
• Carbon Black to provide an enterprise-grade security platform to protect workloads, applications and networks from device to cloud for $2.1 billion.

Already in 2020 VMware bought:

• Nyansa to provide network traffic analytics that covers the SD-WAN and the wired and wireless LAN.

rb-

While the hyper-scale cloud vendors AWS, Azure, GCP, and the Chinese giants battling it out for cloud supremacy. Most enterprises have adopted a multi-cloud strategy. VMware is in the incumbent position as it competes with IBM, maybe Cisco, and HPE to be the glue that binds private and public clouds as well as owned data centers into an enterprise multi-cloud strategy. This is a long-term play.

In the near term – all of the acquisitions since 2018, VMware does not have a lot to show for it financially. VWM has been basically flat. VMW spiked to $150.00 in January 2018, hit a peak of $203.64 in, 2019 and has settled back to $157.50 in February 2020.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.