Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, agreed, saying that if Broadcom held on to just its top 10,000 VMware customers, that would be more than sufficient for it to meet its revenue and profitability goals over the next three years. “Keep in mind that VMWare has over 400K accounts, so the core business case was predicated on retention of the largest 3% of accounts,” he said.
Customers may view the price increases differently depending on how much of the licensed software they use, because the value of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is maximized when all of its components are used, said Matt Kimball, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “The less it is used, the more expensive the platform will seem,” he said. “If I am a legacy VMware customer only interested in vSphere, my price increase will seem incredibly high. Conversely, if I’m using VCF to its fullest extent — virtualization, cloud, security, networking, modern apps, AI, and so forth, then that value is fully realized.”
Disruption level has declined
While 88% of the survey respondents are still finding the acquisition disruptive, the disturbance is becoming less severe; in 2024, 46% said it would be extremely or very disruptive, compared to 25% in 2026. Their top worries are about price increases (89%), uncertainty about plans (85%), and the quality of support (78%).
And although 60% report higher confidence in their VMware strategy than in 2024, 63% have changed that strategy two or more times over the two-year period.
CloudBolt wrote, “Two years in, IT leaders have stopped asking ‘Will this hurt?’ and started asking ‘What does it take to get out?’”
Almost three quarters (72%) are migrating workloads to public cloud IaaS, 43% to Hyper-V/Azure stack, and 34% to SaaS replacements.
