The FTC continues to drag its feet on approving Broadcom\u2019s 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.\xa0
In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of VMWare Explore 2023, we revisit our views on Broadcom\u2019s rationale and likely actions post acquisition. We\u2019ll share current ETR survey data to place VMware\u2019s position in context to the major cloud players, speculate on its AI agenda and give a preview of next week\u2019s VMware Explore. To do so we welcome CUBE analyst Rob Strechay and friend of theCUBE, Zeus Kerravala, principal of ZK Research.\xa0
EU Commission approves Broadcom VMware
Hock Tan blog post on VMware\u2019s 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\u2019s 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