VMware to cut 900 jobs
bizjournals.com
bizjournals.com
I have a few friends that work there. They are happy, but they say that the company lacks any sense of urgency. After Maritz left and more recently Steve Herrod, there seems to be a dearth of really brilliant and inspirational people in the top positions. A lot of great engineers were lost after the 4 year post-IPO options expiration came due last year. As well, there is a lot of middle management, and lots of politics, and apparently lots of fat-cat principal engineers that stick around and do not very much.
All of this spells a recipe for stagnation. The debacle over the last year or so with licensing only cemented the idea that ESX is expensive, and Hyper-V is getting to "good enough" status.
With the firings-by-another-name coming up, expect the politics to get nastier. We'll see the middle managers who don't do very much to turn on the ones that do, leaving an even greater dearth of brilliant coders.
As the size of a company grows the average capability must tend towards the average of the population. I must say that can't be very high, and so you see the results here. Some companies have strict hiring standards, but i think eventually, pressure to hire more people end up costing them the quality.
Not sure if there is a solution, other than to keep the working unit tiny and independent.
Care to share where you're moving to ?
(Disclosure: I am not unbiased)
VMWare images can be imported onto every virtualization system on the planet. Virtualbox, Qemu, KVM, even Bochs can import VMWare images ...
What is the limiting factor ?
This post should be on 'shit HN says' but without the context it won't make any sense.
Somewhat different to some home user sticking Ubuntu on his virtualbox....
Also, the Chicago Tribune[2] article is better than the BizJournals one. One key point in this article is that by the end of 2013, they expect to hire 1000 new employees.
This all sounds like shuffling around of people and trimming a little fat, and has nothing to do with VMWare possibly doing badly.
[1] http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/12/05/vmware-confirms-pivotal-...
[2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-vmware-resu...
They are doing a lot of expanding after they bought all the land around Hillsview, so it would be kind of bad if they started to cut really deeply, a lot of their buildings would be empty.
https://blogs.vmware.com/console/2012/12/the-pivotal-initiat...
EDIT: Although he's now the Chief Strategy Officer at EMC, so maybe that's good. http://www.emc.com/corporate/emc-at-glance/exec-team/index.h...
While this is of course a sad event, it is not a reflection on the strength/weakness of VMware. Actually for a lot of my time here, we've had "carte blanche" in terms of hiring. The challenge was finding enough qualified people. I do think with the recent slew of acquisitions, the company may have grown too much too fast and is needing to reorganize hence this announcement.
From what I heard, the company is still planning to grow its headcount in 2013 from where it is today. It is also engaged in a massive expansion project which will triple the size of the campus in Palo Alto. It would not be undertaking such a massive and costly effort if a permanent downsize is being envisaged.
Given that EMC has a fair amount of control over them in upper management, is it any wonder they are having, uh, growing pains?
There was a lot of excitement internally at the company towards using it but after the first few tries, many have given up in frustration and reverted back to PowerPoint.
I don't have any insight into the SlideRocket team to understand this lack of traction. My theory is that this was more of a whim acquisition on the part of the previous CEO and isn't going anywhere because it falls quite outside the core focus of the company.
It was a struggle finding out what I needed, then finding a way to pay for it, then finding out I'd bought the wrong thing.
They have so many versions of the same product, slightly renamed, with slightly different features - which isn't totally apparent. They seem to have renamed products, but have the old version of the product next to the new version - so you don't exactly know they're different products.
It seems to me that they could benefit a lot from slimming down and offering just 3 products - instead of the 100+ currently.
I can't have been the only person totally confused by all of this - and ultimately it's got to be hurting more than it's gaining.
Perhaps some history might help. EMC originally decided that as they were able to buy a lot of other storage companies and make these acquisitions work, they would do the same thing to be known as leaders in the "enterprise management" space - all so they could sell more storage.
The market apparently was screaming out for a CMDB at the time, so their first acquisition was System Management Arts (SMARTS), which handled event management quite cleverly. Only... it didn't populate the CMDB as well as the market wanted, so EMC then decided to purchase nLayers, which was a network discovery appliance. Then they realised that network discovery alone does not make a CMDB. With this insight, they decided to buy infra, an Australian company that did IT Service Management, with a particular focus around the ITIL framework.
Well what do you know, but Infra might do workflows and ticketing, but it doesn't actually control or automate actual configuration management. Thusly, they decided to remedy this by shortly thereafter purchasing Voyence.
They actually bought a few more companies, but these were the main four.
So at this point, you have at least four separate products, all developed on different architectures with different goals in mind, each of which wasn't talking to each other very well. SMARTS has its own proprietary scripting language and is built on a Java front end, with hooks into Perl. nLayers is a network appliance that runs on some sort of RedHat distribution and is put together with Perl, Apache, tcpdump and an inbuilt Oracle server. infra is a Windows based system that was, when they bought it, only jst running on .NET 2.0 and IIS, with SQL Server and Oracle back ends, with a front end based on (ugh) ActiveX. And Voyence... Well, not rightly sure what Voyence is built on.
In other words, totally different development teams, all basically startups that were dynamic and successful in their own right, each having been shoe-horned into a massive hardware company that has no real clue about software or how to develop or support it, and each largely under the radar of the larger EMC.
So they decide to write some "glue" software to allow all the discovery software to talk to each other. They call this DataCentre Insight (DCI). They have high hopes to do something, allow for mashups and REST based APIs.
Well, this doesn't work. There are a lot of disgruntled employees because the RMSG group is so poorly run. A lot of these companies aren't based in Boston (in fact, they are often in different countries), but Boston decides it knows better how to run the companies. As is the way of these things, the clueless managers start strangling the life out of the smaller companies. Eventually, the guy who went on an acquisition spree, he "leaves".
A new guy comes in. He decides to base the group around Infra, and rebadges all the product names to "Ionix" (rumour has it the original name was something else - Urinix - but Joe Tucci looked at in Word, found spell-checker came up with "urinate" as a suggestion and promptly nixed it). All brand awareness was dumped, nobody knew what suite was what and it was a marketing disaster.
So then DCI was dumped, things kept going downhill, and eventually the new guy, along with another higher up brought in to fix the mess that was Ionix, stitched up a deal to foist the Ionix suite onto VMware. Of course, they keep SMARTS! Probably the best of the bunch because they needed it for certain storage technologies, like ControlCentre.
Well, the VMware guys can't have been too impressed, especially given some of thir new offerings were going to overlap (such as with AppSpeed).
After this point, no idea what happened. It was basically a big mess, caused by stupidity, cultural arrogance by a massive hardware company where cronyism was rife and innovation struggled. But it was largely caused by EMC management.
There are, of course, a lot of other products in the VMware stable, but this should give you some insight into how EMC interferes in VMware. It's a pity, VMWare is a good company!
> projecting revenue in the range of $1.17 billion to $1.19
> billion, compared with $1.25 billion expected by analysts.
> VMWare shares fell 15 percent
Yet I looked the profit for VMWare for Q3 of 2012 and it's indicated that they made some 150 million dollars in Q3 of 2012. Then again, I am not an entrepreneur, sure, I might not understand all the details so this might be a bit naive but 150 million dollars in profit still seems like a good chunk of money and kind of clashes in my head with firing 900 people, the kind of situation I would expect if the company was bleeding money all over the place.
Then I looked some more and found this and it got even more confusing: http://www.eweek.com/virtualization/vmware-q4-earnings-up-bu...
From a noob outsider's point of view, it's almost as if the "value" of the company is not really correlated with its ability to make money and release good products, but on some decision from the market. And I guess this is where I (and most people who are not stock jockeys) completely lose track, where does that projection of what the earnings should be come from? How do people gauge that a quarter is a solid one or a bad one? Real question, any insight appreciated.
"The company projected annual 2013 total revenues to be in the range of $5.23 billion to $5.35 billion." That's a variation of 120 million right there. Those 900 people could mean the difference between making money with the high estimate vs the low estimate.
Note that the stock price dropped not because it was a bad quarter (it was a good quarter), but because vmware said projected future revenue is expected to be lower than predicted.
That's 'cause you probably never built a business from scratch. Believe me, not one person who has labored to start, launch and run their own business would make the comment you have. Not ONE.
These kinds of statements only come out of a certain place and this is the same place that confused revenue with profit.
This is also the place that doesn't understand that a company has to have a financial buffer in place in order to survive the many variables in business that hit you each and every day. What do you think happens when you have a bad quarter and you still have to make payroll for a couple of thousand employees? And pay leases, rents, power, insurance and other expenses?
Have you ever had the experience of having to use your personal credit cards to make payroll because you had a bad month? Do that and maybe you'll understand why the comment that doesn't "register" with you "registers" 1000% with those of us who live a different reality.
Doesn't mean you were guaranteed success. Doesn't mean you didn't have to pay bills or take risks. Doesn't mean you did nothing. Does mean you are not a heroic John Galt pulling himself up by the bootstraps in spite of the rest of society being parasitic.
It was your choice to start a business, don't complain at other people if they have not taken the same risk. They also don't have the business.
I never signed the social contract; and food to slave does not entitle ownership. My use of the roads, or benefit derived from them, is defensible.
Else I ask; in what manner may I make myself free? Is there a way out of the perpetual claim against my livelihood?
Further, if social responsibility is so great for my common man, what right do you have to demand my efforts go towards local healthcare when others a bit further away starve? What makes a fellow countryman more due for grain than a differing skinned man in a land far away? Is it not indefensible to claim ownership of my resources for your health, but hold firm against the claims by others against claims of ownership against your wealth for nourishment.
Yes. Leave.
Every minute you spend still here, you're re-signing the social contract.
If you don't want to support the upkeep for the society you've chosen to participate in, and continue to choose to participate in with every action that isn't making for the door, then don't participate. You don't get to reap the benefits of living in a society without sharing some of the weight of keeping it running.
You're free to disagree with how it's kept running. I certainly do. You're even free to take action (within the limits of the laws of the society you're part of) to change how it's kept running if you disagree strongly enough, and can present a better alternative.
But to begrudge the fact that you ante up some of your livelihood in order to make sure that the laws and services and such that protect and support your continued participation in society, which includes earning that livelihood, while continuing to participate, is selfish beyond reason.
I'm not against working and helping the needy, those born mentally handicapped to the poor, for example; what I'm against is what I consider to be the false: Benefit begets claim. I am happy to help the poor, and I do help them beyond the actions of the state.
The collective and violent claims by others stop my ability to leave since all habitable land is claimed. Furthermore, maybe I want to live in a collective much like Canada, but since not enough others hold the basic views that I hold, there is not yet a stateless society with voluntary order, including lifelong agreements to pay a portion of gross personal revenue to the collective.
Not true, Bir Tawil [1] is an 800 sq mile territory unclaimed by both of the countries which surround it - Egypt and Sudan. However I'm sure that after a short while there the infrastructure, public works, etc referenced by one of the parent posters will be sorely missed.
> It is not accurate to pretend that you are 100%, solely responsible for your own success, without any other contributing factors.
I don't know of any entrepreneur who thinks this way. Not one. Your success as an entrepreneur depends on a myriad of factors external to you. The roads? The power grid? Transportation? Banks? Please. Stop it. It hurts.
How about we all stop and thank Spain then? Without the Crown investing in expeditions that led to the discovery of the American Continent you wouldn't be enjoying that cup of Starbucks Coffee.
Oh, yes, let's also thank our governments for starting wars. Without WW1 and WW2 you might not have penicillin, radios, planes, cars and a bunch of other things you enjoy today. They were brilliant! Too bad they had to kill a hundred million people in the process.
Crazy, right?
Right.
My advise to anyone buying into this kind of thinking is simple: Go start a business. Learn what it takes to actually earn your keep from scratch and even create jobs and be responsible for the livelihood and well-being of families besides your own. Succeed. Fail. Learn. Rise-up and succeed again. Then come back and see what you think of these ideas. I'll bet you a donut you will not think very highly of them. That's the power of reality.
Are you implying that there's some kind of a cultural or educational element in France that might bias your views?
I am genuinely interested. I've spent a lot of time in other parts of Europe but, sadly, never visited France so I don't have any first-hand impressions to go by.
Self-determination and the myth of pre-disposition are core values of protestantism which largely influenced the way Anglo-Saxon societies approach self-enterprise and self-reliance in general. Luther was quite insistent that each individual should have direct relation to God through scripture, which promotes the idea that one gets to decide things for oneself and should not rely on middlemen. Protestantism also doesn't promote self-castigation as much as catholicism, which creates an atmosphere where people are actually encouraged to acquire wealth, thrive as entrepreneurs, etc.
In France on the other hand, our culture, due to the aforementioned mostly Catholic culture, success and the amassing of riches is seen as something you should not boast about and almost repent for.
I'm talking general religious influences on the collective unconscious of a nation as a whole here, particular cases might of course be much less coarse in their specifics. The other very important difference is the fact that France has traditionally tried to preserve a strong social safety net and government involvement in most matters (education, transportation, health care, roads, investment in research, major companies, national defense, etc) is still strong and has wide support among the population, which as you know means that everyone and businesses in particular have an obligation to give back to society as they grow (through high taxes), to ensure that we can then try our best to share the benefits with everyone for the greater good.
As a result of all this, there is much less of an incentive for self-entrepreneurship and much less possibilities for the likes of Google, Facebook, Enron or other American business behemoths to emerge, which creates an atmosphere where the emphasis on business is not as strong as it is in the States. We don't have channels as big as Bloomberg or other 24/7 stock market channels here, we don't know the ins and outs of lemonade stands at age 8, we don't read about trading theories, MBAs are not as big, etc.
TL;DR: The emphasis on business and self-entrepreneurship in particular is not as big in France as it is in most "Protestant" societies because we favor a model where everyone is in a mediocre middle rather than having people going through the roof and others down the gutter. Different approaches and I don't reckon either to be inherently superior to the other, they're just, well, different approaches.
Please think about what you just said.
What is the difference between revenue and profit?
To investors revenue targets are linked to bottom line profits. That's what they are reacting to.
The reason can be summed up in one word - expectations. If everyone was expecting a profit of around 1.5 billion (shares would have been trading accordingly) and results come in at 1 billion then clearly there is likely to a significant and immediate drop in the share price.
VMW had declining profits (with increasing revenues) for 5 quarters in a row now. That is very bad.
Anyone care to speculate about what these business lines are? The virtual network tech acquired with Nicira ?
I think the sale of SpringSource to Oracle is unlikely though.
That said, it's cool that companies like VMware pay people like you to do the things that people like you do. It certainly gives VMware a few upvotes in my book.
i bet all these poor bastard devs had to do 'team building exercises', file endless TPS reports, and forced to enjoy TGIF jeans day to indoctrinate you into the company cult then it's layoff time.
As far as large companies go it gets a lot worse than VMware though they seem to have lost direction somewhat.
The problem of largeness is that decision makers are so far removed from the decision they can't possibly make good decisions. It's certainly possible for small companies to make bad decisions as well.
It cuts both ways, for sure.
At big companies, if it is done right, the upper level management may ask for input from 1st line managers as to who they should fire. Also, my last company, all managers had to rank their underlings, and those at the bottom had a chance of being trimmed if there were layoffs.
Many big companies will listen to those first line managers, and almost any upper-level manager is aware of their lack of knowledge about the leaves of the management tree.
They will then look to trim off "luxury expenses" and if they are not a tech company, having a full time IT/dev guy is likely to be one of them.
Large and small organizations can both have politics, can see drastic restructuring when business changes or a major client makes a change (drops a product, demands a change, ...). Large companies may insulate somewhat against capricious changes, though non-operational circumstances (particularly mismanagement or liquidity crunches of the holding corporation) can cause sudden and drastic changes (Borders, UAL, American Airlines). Small companies can have cash-flow issues as well.
There's very little that's assured in life. Death and taxes you can count on.
Why do they have to be clueless? Projects are never failures? They could cut a terrible project and still end up laying off good people. Is that a bad thing?
I've been here for a year and I've yet to file a single TPS report, attend a team building exercise, and they throw company-wide beer bashes every Friday (usually with pretty good food).
It's a good place to work, in other words. Is it the same as a startup? Not at all. But if you're going to join a big company, you shouldn't be expecting that either.
Not that I feel great about anyone losing their jobs, but it's hard to get a sense of what this means for VMWare without knowing their "restructuring plan". Are they HR department consolidations from acquisitions? Sales consolidations? There's a difference.
I assume they're not replacing 900 software developers with virtualized developers who run just above the metal.
my team building exercise was last week and it was 3.5 hours of go-karting in burlingame and a catered lunch. we had the rest of the day off. it was the first team building exercise my team did in my 12 months here, unless you count things like a halloween or christmas party.
i've never had to do a tps report. the closest thing we have would be updating our internal wiki every week with a weekly status.
we get to wear whatever the fuck we want. i got teased about going out for interviews when i wore a button-down shirt on laundry day instead of an ozzfest t-shirt with a massive screaming demon head on it (i thought it would be unprofessional; silly me). that's not to say that you get made fun of for wearing button-down shirts; i only did because i pretty much only wear t-shirts to work. i'd say about 3/4 of my team wears button-down shirts or the female equivalent. most people wear jeans. shorts are common in the summer. some people wear flip-flops year round.
the idea that all big companies are going to be bad or even just worse than small companies is just silly. yes, there's shitty large companies, but there are also shitty small companies and shitty medium companies. but that's because of a bad or incompetent management team, not because of the size of the organization.
now i work down in the new sv office, which has become nearly full within just a few months.