What I don't understand is what prevents them to shop around for alternatives. What is VMWare's very good moat that prevents the competition from invading their castle?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/03/24/half-of-vmwa...
2. Tesco had a good deal they paid for ahead of time, with the full support cycle detailed in the contract that Broadcom is refusing to honor.
3. Broadcom is arguing that since Tesco is migrating off, they can't sue for damages. Tesco would probably counter argue that the migration is due to Broadcom not honoring the original contract.
Then there's training. you can't easily switch your admins and service desk techs to a different product. That alone takes months, of not years, and costs a lot. Rewrite all processes, etc.
Then there's 3rd party integration. Since VMware was basically the "default", most 3rd party products offered turnkey integration into VMware, and VMware only. Think backup applications or security etc. You don't switch backup vendors easily (for the same reasons - training, features, ...) and if you do consider it, it adds to the cost
This is why, for many companies that don't have 50-100 people or more in their IT department, it's more expensive to switch away from VMware so they grudgingly pay, while trying to move as much workload away from it as possible.
... but then again, neither does VMware, apparently.
20 years ago anyone and everyone had datacenters full of VMware. Now most of it is stuff that a company hasn't bothered to move to cloud yet. There's a few things it's still the best choice for but those are niche things. Like stuff that absolutely needs to be self hosted for privacy or security. The time of VMware being the default is long gone.
Moving from a mainstream to a niche product means a market that's shrinking. No growth potential. No potential for new competitors to start up. Proxmox is good but it's not exactly enterprise.
This is why Broadcom bought it and sucks the most value out of it before it completely disappears.
That just isn't true. The reality is that being in the cloud is not beneficial for most businesses. They do it because it's trendy, not because it's the best solution. In recent years we've seen more and more recognition of that fact, and it has driven people to host stuff on prem.
However the fact is that most companies do this anyhow and they feel like it's the best solution. Onprem vmware is just a shrinking market. I don't really see that expanding again until it hits rockbottom and of course broadcom's behaviour isn't helping.