Broadcom CEO Hock Tan made a surprise appearance at VMware's big annual conference, VMware Explore, which kicked off this week in San Francisco.
The event, which hosted over 23,000 attendees in 2018, had very few signs of VMware's buyer — until the keynote on the second day. At the top of his speech, VMware CEO Rangarajan Raghuram welcomed Tan, who was sitting in the audience. The event video feed panned to show Tan waving as attendees applauded.
"In May of this year, we announced our next major transition," Raghuram said, referring to his firm's $61 billion deal to sell to the chip giant Broadcom. "Since then, I've spent a lot of time talking with Tan and his team to open up VMware's next great stage of innovation."
While Tan and many VMware employees attended the event in person, most Broadcom employees tuned in to the conference virtually, according to Raghuram.
With Broadcom absent from the speaker list leading up to the event, there had been questions around what the firm's presence at the conference would be like in light of the deal. Many VMware employees and customers showed up hoping to get some answers about the acquisition, which has left many fearing their jobs are at risk, Insider previously reported. On the first day of the conference, when they saw that there wasn't even a Broadcom employee or booth in sight, some told Insider their worries about the deal grew.
Insider previously reported that customers were "very concerned" about the Broadcom acquisition, with them rushing to close deals before 2023, when Broadcom can hike the prices on them. The semiconductor giant has earned a reputation of buying up companies and then aggressively cutting costs and hiking prices to boost profits. Many smaller firms have been afraid the buyout of VMware, once known for going above and beyond for its customers, will push them out. Prior to the acquisition announcement, Broadcom told investors the firm is "totally focused on the priorities" of 600 top strategic accounts. Regarding VMware, Tan has since said on an investor call that the company will make sure it's longer tail of 300,000 customer are well supported, but "we will go through it and we will handle these guys through partners."
"What typically happens with acquisitions like this is that innovation stops," an IT professional for a smaller VMware customer in the oil industry told Insider at the conference. Insider spoke with several smaller customers at the event who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak with the press, but their identities are known to Insider.
Several smaller customers told Insider they're worried that when the buyout closed, they may be forced to switch to bigger vendors like Microsoft, despite preferring VMware services.
"While we use Microsoft for some things, VMware bends over backwards for its customers, big or small," an IT supervisor at the Bureau of Technology in Portland, Oregon, told Insider. "Microsoft will answer our questions, but they don't need us. We are a small customer to them."
But the IT professional at the oil-industry customer told Insider that seeing Tan at the conference made him more optimistic about the acquisition, saying it was a "good sign" Tan was there. The myriad announcements at the keynote also showed that VMware was still serious about continuing to innovate, he said.
VMware and Broadcom did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.
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