More than two years after Broadcom acquired VMware, customers are still dealing with higher bills, lingering uncertainty, and the reality of escaping vendor lock-in.
CloudBolt Software has pushed out a report titled “The Mass Exodus That Never Was: The Squeeze Is Just Beginning”, based on a survey of 302 North American IT decision-makers at companies with at least 1,000 staff, run in January.
Broadcom closed the VMware deal in November 2023, and 88 per cent of respondents still called the change “disruptive” at the time of the survey.
The top reason was price increases, cited by 89 per cent, followed by uncertainty about Broadcom’s plans (85 per cent) and concerns about support quality (78 per cent).
Respondents cited Broadcom’s shift of VMware from perpetual licences to subscriptions (72 per cent), partner programme changes (68 per cent), and forced product bundling (65 per cent).
When the takeover landed, some customers talked about quotes jumping by as much as 1,000 per cent, but CloudBolt’s numbers suggest most increases have been painful rather than apocalyptic.
More than 14 per cent said their VMware costs have at least doubled; 12 per cent reported increases of 50 to 99 per cent; 33 per cent saw increases of 24 to 49 per cent; and 31 per cent said it was less than 25 per cent.
Even with that more restrained spread, 85 per cent said they are worried VMware will get even more expensive.
On the migration front, 36 per cent said they have moved one to 24 per cent of their VMware environment, 32 per cent have shifted 25 to 49 per cent, 10 per cent have moved 50 to 74 per cent and two per cent have migrated 75 per cent or more.
Five per cent said they have not migrated off VMware, which sounds like either resignation or a full project backlog.
Among those that have moved workloads, 72 per cent went to public cloud infrastructure as a service, while 43 per cent used Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Azure stack.
CloudBolt said 86 per cent of respondents “are actively reducing their VMware footprint”, but the report title makes the point that this is a grind, not a stampede.
