Ninety percent of organizations using VMware are actively exploring alternatives to their current virtualization strategy, driven primarily by licensing cost increases following Broadcom's 2023 acquisition.
A survey of 300 VMware-using organizations globally found 73 percent now prioritize cost savings in virtualization roadmap decisions. Customers report licensing costs rising 100 to 300 percent since the Broadcom takeover, with some facing increases exceeding 1,000 percent. Fifty-four percent cited Broadcom's decision to end support for perpetual license holders as a factor pushing them away.
The exit barriers are steep. Forty percent of respondents identified operational complexity as the main obstacle to switching. Multi-vendor management challenges affected 38 percent, while 37 percent each flagged security concerns and skills gaps associated with new platforms.
Sixty percent of surveyed organizations are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy to reduce single-vendor reliance. Forty-seven percent favor hybrid IT environments combining hypervisors and containers. Notably, 48 percent do not plan to migrate any assets to Broadcom's Cloud Foundation platform, signaling a longer-term shift toward heterogeneous, multi-platform virtualization architectures.
Tony Harvey, senior director analyst at Gartner, previously described Broadcom's acquisition as a "wake-up call" for customers dependent on a single vendor. The licensing repricing has accelerated what analysts call a forced diversification across enterprise infrastructure—a structural break from VMware's decades of dominance in on-premises virtualization.
