A couple of decades ago, virtualization was the hottest technology, and VMware was the leading vendor in the market. Fast forward to today, VMware is part of Broadcom, and virtual machines (VMs) are now legacy technology.
The Portworx's "The Voice of Kubernetes Experts Report 2024 The Data Trends Driving the Future of the Enterprise" report says the shifts occurring in virtualization following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware brought a lot of uncertainty and concerns among VMware’s customer base.
In fact, Broadcom’s decision to streamline product packaging and introduce VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) subscription offering has increased customer's fear, uncertainty, and doubts, prompting many of them to rethink their virtualization strategy. This SDxCentral’s article mentions VMware’s attempt to counter some of the FUD noise in the market by stating that, as part of the new subscription update, VCF pricing was cut in half – from $700 per core per year to $350 per core per year.
The problem is that the new VCF is not an option for customers. It's an expensive mandate, which has replaced the perpetual CPU-based model. VCF pricing reduction is good for customers with multiple solutions (i.e., vSphere + vSAN or NSX or Aria – or any combination of them). But its price increase is quite significant for customers with a single VMware solution.
Naveen Chhabra, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, explains on SDxCentral that the “previous model would allow customers to buy just a shirt, but now Broadcom’s is pushing customers to buy a whole suit.”
According to Forrester Research there was one customer who was “experiencing a 500% price increase."
Crayon, an European IT Consulting firm, says the changes in VMware product and pricing have resulted in real-world increases of up to 1,200% – for a business spending $100,000 per year in VMware costs, that investment now looks like $1,000,000+.
Forrester's Naveen Chhabra predicts that "20% of the world’s largest enterprises will start to exit - read these words very carefully - will start to exit the VMware stack.” He also notes the move away from VMware will not happen overnight, but in parts.
Read Part-2 now.
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