
A survey of 1,080 current and former customers of VMware finds that while many either already are or expect to be paying more for the same software they already license, only 12% are planning to move workloads to another platform.
Conducted by Civo, a provider of a cloud service based on a Kubernetes cluster, the survey finds that in the wake of the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, nearly 70% of respondents are currently expecting a price increase, with nearly half (48%) already spending more to access the same capabilities they had before the acquisition.
Among those who have faced price increases, nearly half (48%) reported their costs have doubled. Over a quarter (30%) have seen a fourfold increase, and 15% have experienced a tenfold surge in prices, the survey finds.
Additionally, nearly half (45%) said their organization can no longer operate with the same agility.
Civo CEO Mark Boost said that while migrating existing workloads from one platform to another can be expensive, IT organizations are clearly weighing where to deploy their next generation of workloads by, for example, migrating to a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) that would then enable a workload to be encapsulated into a container that could be deployed on a Kubernetes cluster.
Broadcom, conversely, is encouraging larger organizations to either upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), a subscription offering that includes the full suite of VMware offerings, or move to VMware vSphere Foundation, which has now superseded the core VMware vSphere platform that is used by most customers.
Broadcom argues that VCF effectively reduces the total cost of IT by providing access to not just vSphere but also vSAN and NSX network virtualization software and a raft of other capabilities. In effect, Broadcom contends that most enterprise IT organizations will need these capabilities and that compared to a combination of third-party platforms, VCF is less expensive.
VMware vSphere Foundation, meanwhile, provides more advanced capabilities than VMware vSphere via a three-year subscription license versus VMware vSphere. The core issue is that previously VMware vSphere was available under a perpetual license that enabled organizations to pay for a license upfront that allowed them to use an instance of VMware vSphere indefinitely. Not surprisingly, nearly half (45%) of survey respondents said their organization can no longer operate with the same agility.
However, the number of commercial providers of software that make any type of perpetual license available has dwindled to a handful, so in that sense it is arguable that it was only a matter of time before VMware even without prompting from Broadcom would have ended perpetual licensing.
Each organization will need to determine its own best path forward. However, each additional platform added to an IT environment increases total cost of ownership (TCO) by requiring more tools and, usually, additional staff.
Regardless of the path chosen, it would appear one way or another, costs are going to rise in a way many IT organizations didnโt initially suspect when the acquisition of VMware was first proposed.