Comment Broadcom’s mooted acquisition of VMware looks odd at face value, but if considered as a means to make edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) more mature and manageable, and give organizations the tools to drive them, the deal makes rather more sense.
Edge and IoT are the two coming things in computing and will grow for years, meaning the proposed deal could be very good for VMware’s current customers.
An Ethernet switch that Broadcom launched this week shows why this is a plausible scenario.
The machine boasts an Arm-designed subsystem, is intended for use in cars, and was “designed to address the growing bandwidth need for in-vehicle networking applications and facilitate the adoption of software defined vehicles.”
A software-defined vehicle is essentially a car that can have its software upgraded. It’s assumed we’ll soon expect things like updates to the AI or algorithms that helps a car handle icy roads, because it’s not as if that software will stop evolving when a vehicle leaves the factory. So when winter comes around, automakers will try to sell you this year’s model (pun intended) and may also be selling the data your car collects to improve that model.
Can you think of a company that’s good at packaging and publishing apps to myriad devices, and to servers on the edge? VMware can do that, and does it already. Do automakers really want to build their own stack to distribute software? Probably not. And most probably use VMware already, somewhere.
Broadcom also certainly knows that automakers want more tech in their products, but worry the computers that could make future cars fabulous will increase complexity, weight, and cost.
The Linux and virtualization communities noticed this ages ago, which is why and have worked on lightweight operating systems and hypervisors that will allow a single on-board computer to suffice for most of a car’s needs, by isolating workloads. Toyota went shopping for such a system in 2017, the same year in which the Xen Project made automotive uses a priority for its hypervisor. In a world of CPU dies carrying chiplets of different capacities, a good hypervisor can shunt a car’s cabin temperature sensors onto slow cores and let LIDAR and other sensors work with nice fast processors.
Can you think of a company that has a lightweight Linux, an excellent hypervisor, and can use it to manage VMs, containers, and isolating workloads? A company with a deep understanding of how to use virtualisation tech baked into chips?
VMware ticks all those boxes.
Broadcom’s switch also boasts “an advanced rule-based packet filter engine that can adapt to different vehicle operation modes to enhance driving safety.”
That matters because carmakers know that as more automation finds its way into vehicles, there will be moments when traffic from a certain sensor needs priority. Drivers won’t complain that the car radio skipped a beat if they’re alive to tell the tale.
Can you think of a company that is strong in software-defined networks and network function virtualisation, and has expertise across many devices?
By now you can guess my answer.
Cars are a very decent market: about 80 million a year roll off the production line.
But the billions of connected IoT devices that will soon be built each year have similar security, software deployment, and manageability requirements to cars.
And while they won’t have Broadcom switches inside, they may well have other Broadcom silicon.
So maybe Broadcom sees VMware as a way to build a stack that elevates it from a chip designer with a seemingly strange software annex to a chip designer with a very broad IoT software deployment and management solution.
At this point, users who have made VMware the heart of their datacenter might take comfort from Broadcom having a plausible plan to keep their supplier thriving. They’d be right to also worry that Broadcom’s previous enterprise software acquisitions – CA Technologies and Symantec – have not exactly set the world on fire since being bought, delivering seven percent year on year growth in FY 2021, amid reports of considerable layoffs among former Symantec staff. If either Symantec or CA is doing new or interesting things, Broadcom isn't telling the world about those activities.
But VMware is currently a $13bn business, massively larger than CA or Symantec when acquired, and also a leader in its field. Broadcom would be daft to turn its back on VMware’s existing business and leadership position to chase an IoT dream. Instead, VMware’s current business could fund development of the IoT stack.
And with every current VMware client almost certain to do something with the IoT, the virtualization giant gives Broadcom a ready-made customer base. VMware itself banks on this for its efforts to move towards containers, with a pitch that nobody wants one management stack for VMs and another for Kubernetes. Broadcom can make the same argument for IoT.
So maybe Broadcom buying VMware at a time its shares have been dragged down by inflation and war isn’t the cynical act of corporate raiding and/or bargain hunting it appears at first flush.
But it’s not you I need to convince of that. Broadcom needs to convince Michael Dell and private equity firm SilverLake, as they together hold more than half of VMware shares. ®
PS: Yes, we know Broadcom more or less quit the IoT world in 2016. That was mainly small wireless gadgets. The rise of edge computing and 5G means lots more devices in more places.
Russian crooks are selling network credentials and virtual private network access for a "multitude" of US universities and colleges on criminal marketplaces, according to the FBI.
According to a warning issued on Thursday, these stolen credentials sell for thousands of dollars on both dark web and public internet forums, and could lead to subsequent cyberattacks against individual employees or the schools themselves.
"The exposure of usernames and passwords can lead to brute force credential stuffing computer network attacks, whereby attackers attempt logins across various internet sites or exploit them for subsequent cyber attacks as criminal actors take advantage of users recycling the same credentials across multiple accounts, internet sites, and services," the Feds' alert [PDF] said.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft often support privacy in public statements, but behind the scenes they've been working through some common organizations to weaken or kill privacy legislation in US states.
That's according to a report this week from news non-profit The Markup, which said the corporations hire lobbyists from the same few groups and law firms to defang or drown state privacy bills.
The report examined 31 states when state legislatures were considering privacy legislation and identified 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms working on behalf of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with industry groups like TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition.
America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance.
A letter [PDF] from the SEC addressed to the tech billionaire said he "[did] not appear" to have filed the proper form detailing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter "required 10 days from the date of acquisition," and asked him to provide more information. Musk's shares made him one of Twitter's largest shareholders. The letter is dated April 4, and was shared this week by the regulator.
Musk quickly moved to try and buy the whole company outright in a deal initially worth over $44 billion. Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion and bagged another $7.14 billion from investors to help finance the $21 billion he promised to put forward for the deal. The remaining $25.5 billion bill was secured via debt financing by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. But the takeover is not going smoothly.
Cloud security company Lacework has laid off 20 percent of its employees, just months after two record-breaking funding rounds pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion.
A spokesperson wouldn't confirm the total number of employees affected, though told The Register that the "widely speculated number on Twitter is a significant overestimate."
The company, as of March, counted more than 1,000 employees, which would push the jobs lost above 200. And the widely reported number on Twitter is about 300 employees. The biz, based in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2015.
A researcher at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence team found eight vulnerabilities in the Open Automation Software (OAS) platform that, if exploited, could enable a bad actor to access a device and run code on a targeted system.
The OAS platform is widely used by a range of industrial enterprises, essentially facilitating the transfer of data within an IT environment between hardware and software and playing a central role in organizations' industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) efforts. It touches a range of devices, including PLCs and OPCs and IoT devices, as well as custom applications and APIs, databases and edge systems.
Companies like Volvo, General Dynamics, JBT Aerotech and wind-turbine maker AES are among the users of the OAS platform.
Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.
"The full impact and duration of the war in Ukraine and COVID lockdowns in China is difficult to predict. However, the impact of our technology and our market opportunities remain unchanged," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, during the company's first-quarter earnings call.
Those two statements might sound a little contradictory, including to some investors, particularly following the stock selloff yesterday after concerns over Russia and China prompted Nvidia to issue lower-than-expected guidance for second-quarter revenue.
HPE is lifting the lid on a new AI supercomputer – the second this week – aimed at building and training larger machine learning models to underpin research.
Based at HPE's Center of Excellence in Grenoble, France, the new supercomputer is to be named Champollion after the French scholar who made advances in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 19th century. It was built in partnership with Nvidia using AMD-based Apollo computer nodes fitted with Nvidia's A100 GPUs.
Champollion brings together HPC and purpose-built AI technologies to train machine learning models at scale and unlock results faster, HPE said. HPE already provides HPC and AI resources from its Grenoble facilities for customers, and the broader research community to access, and said it plans to provide access to Champollion for scientists and engineers globally to accelerate testing of their AI models and research.
HR and finance application vendor Workday's CEO, Aneel Bhusri, confirmed deal wins expected for the three-month period ending April 30 were being pushed back until later in 2022.
The SaaS company boss was speaking as Workday recorded an operating loss of $72.8 million in its first quarter [PDF] of fiscal '23, nearly double the $38.3 million loss recorded for the same period a year earlier. Workday also saw revenue increase to $1.43 billion in the period, up 22 percent year-on-year.
However, the company increased its revenue guidance for the full financial year. It said revenues would be between $5.537 billion and $5.557 billion, an increase of 22 percent on earlier estimates.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is lining up yet another investigation into Google over its dominance of the digital advertising market.
This latest inquiry, announced Thursday, is the second major UK antitrust investigation into Google this year alone. In March this year the UK, together with the European Union, said it wished to examine Google's "Jedi Blue" agreement with Meta to allegedly favor the former's Open Bidding ads platform.
The news also follows proposals last week by a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to create legislation that could force Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Amazon to divest portions of their ad businesses.
Microsoft has hit the brakes on hiring in some key product areas as the company prepares for the next fiscal year and all that might bring.
According to reports in the Bloomberg, the unit that develops Windows, Office, and Teams is affected and while headcount remains expected to grow, new hires in that division must first be approved by bosses.
During a talk this week at JP Morgan's Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Rajesh Jha, executive VP for the Office Product Group, noted that within three years he expected approximately two-thirds of CIOs to standardize on Microsoft Teams. 1.4 billion PCs were running Windows. He also remarked: "We have lots of room here to grow the seats with Office 365."
Enterprises are still kitting out their workforce with the latest computers and refreshing their datacenter hardware despite a growing number of "uncertainties" in the world.
This is according to hardware tech bellwethers including Dell, which turned over $26.1 billion in sales for its Q1 of fiscal 2023 ended 29 April, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent.
"We are seeing a shift in spend from consumer and PCs to datacenter infrastructure," said Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and co-chief operating officer. "IT demand is currently healthy," he added.
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