Steep Price Increases After Broadcom Takeover Push Corporate Customers Away From VMware

Corporate technology departments are reconsidering their long-standing reliance on VMware after sharp billing changes upended their computing budgets. A study of 300 enterprises worldwide indicates that nine in ten organizations are currently assessing competing products, driven primarily by steep price increases for virtualization licenses.

The data comes from enterprise support vendor Rimini Street, which commissioned Unisphere Research to survey enterprise users. Although Rimini has a commercial interest in highlighting customer dissatisfaction because it sells independent technical support, the findings reflect widespread disruption across enterprise data centers since semiconductor giant Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware.

Following the buyout, corporate clients encountered dramatic shifts in how VMware packages and sells its foundational virtualization tools. The company eliminated perpetual software licenses, forcing buyers into recurring subscription agreements. More than half of surveyed technology teams singled out this cancellation of perpetual license maintenance as a primary reason for seeking alternatives.

The financial strain on enterprise budgets has been severe. Customers have reported price hikes ranging from double or triple their previous rates to surges reaching 1,000 percent. Consequently, nearly three-quarters of the organizations surveyed cited reducing overhead as their highest priority when planning their future computing setups.

Walking away from deeply embedded infrastructure software, however, presents steep operational obstacles. Four out of ten respondents pointed to heightened operational complexity as a major barrier to shifting workloads, noting that virtual machines underpin critical everyday operations that cannot easily be paused or rebuilt.

Procuring and managing replacement software also creates administrative friction. Thirty-eight percent of participants worried about juggling contracts and support channels across several different software providers, while thirty-seven percent cited a lack of in-house skills and institutional knowledge required to administer unfamiliar virtualization engines.

Security concerns present another significant hurdle. Thirty-seven percent of respondents noted that introducing new virtualization systems expands their potential attack surface, raising the prospect of vulnerabilities during the transition phase. Companies are attempting to minimize these risks while still searching for fiscal relief.

Rather than swapping one sole provider for another, many organizations are diversifying their technology stacks. Sixty percent are considering setups that combine different hypervisors, and forty-seven percent are mixing virtual systems with lightweight application containers. Meanwhile, forty-eight percent stated they have no intention of shifting workloads into VMware Cloud Foundation, demonstrating strong resistance to deeper commitments with the vendor.