Is the Broadcom Deal for VMware in Trouble
What is the EU seeing in the deal that makes it anticompetitive.
Here’s the WSJ piece on why the EU is taking an extended look at the deal. I wanted to guess why this is so. I think the review concerns Nvidia, Intel, and AMD being disadvantaged. It’s about the SmartNIC and DPU market. VMware is hot and heavy about pushing the virtualization stack down to the DPU/SmartNIC.
It takes heavy collaboration between the hardware manufacturer and the hypervisor company to successfully push hypervisor functionality to the SmartNIC. Unlike x86, there’s no standard to make this work across vendors. Why should the EU be concerned?
Take a look at the Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) market post-Dell-EMC-VMware merger. Dell partnered with several HCI vendors before the VMware purchase. Post-merger Dell and VMware partnered to create VxRail. VxRail dominates the HCI market mainly due to the level of integration with VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation. In comparison, HPE, Lenovo, and Cisco have all been left in the cold. And Nutanix is now up for sale.
What happens to Intel, AMD, and Nvidia when VMware and Broadcom create an incredible product integration around Broadcom’s SmartNIC/DPU?