Ninety percent of organizations using VMware are actively exploring alternative virtualization strategies, citing cost increases as the primary driver, according to Rimini Street's 2026 IT Virtualization Survey of 300 global enterprises.
Since Broadcom acquired VMware, customers report licensing cost increases of 100 to 300 percent, with some facing hikes as high as 1,000 percent. Seventy-three percent of respondents prioritized cost savings as a core criterion in their virtualization roadmap decisions.
The immediate trigger: fifty-four percent of respondents cited Broadcom's termination of perpetual license support as a reason to seek alternatives. That forced discontinuation removes the one economic lever enterprises had—spread capital spend over years rather than face recurring subscription fees.
The switching math is brutal. Forty percent of organizations identified operational complexity as the top barrier to exit, while thirty-eight percent flagged multi-vendor management overhead. Another thirty-seven percent each cited security concerns around expanded attack surface and the need to build new technical skills.
Tony Harvey, senior director analyst at Gartner, previously called the Broadcom acquisition a "wake-up call" for clients overly reliant on a single vendor. The survey results validate that characterization: sixty percent of respondents are now evaluating multi-hypervisor strategies to reduce vendor lock-in.
The strategic shift is material. Forty-seven percent favor a hybrid IT environment combining hypervisors and containers for workload flexibility. Only forty-eight percent are planning any migration to VMware's Cloud Foundation platform—a metric that exposes friction in Broadcom's attempt to move customers into its hybrid-cloud stack.
The pattern reflects a broader calculus: enterprises are willing to absorb transition costs and operational friction to escape a vendor's price-gouging. For Broadcom, that's the real risk. Licensing revenue extracted from a shrinking base of captive customers looks very different from licensing revenue that holds a growing, competitive moat.
