Rimini Street released a virtualization survey examining how 300 organizations worldwide are responding to VMware’s shifting business landscape. The research, conducted in partnership with Unisphere Research, revealed significant dissatisfaction among VMware customers regarding licensing expenses, with nine in ten respondents indicating they are evaluating competing platforms.
Cost considerations emerged as the primary driver of VMware customers’ strategic reassessment. The survey found that 73 percent of participants identified cost savings as a leading priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions. Additionally, 54 percent of respondents cited Broadcom’s decision to discontinue support for perpetual license holders as a factor in their exploration of alternatives. Since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, customers have reported experiencing price increases ranging from modest hikes of 100 to 300 percent to substantially higher jumps of approximately 1,000 percent.
Organizations pursuing virtualization changes identified several significant obstacles to implementing new strategies. The most commonly cited barriers included operational complexity, multi-vendor management challenges, securing expanded attack surfaces, and addressing team skill requirements. Despite these challenges, the survey indicated that enterprises are actively seeking approaches to mitigate risk and minimize disruption during transitions.
The research revealed a marked shift toward more diversified infrastructure approaches. Approximately 60 percent of surveyed organizations are considering multi-hypervisor strategies, while 47 percent favor hybrid environments combining hypervisors and containers. Nearly half of respondents indicated they are not planning to adopt VMware’s Cloud Foundation hybrid cloud platform. These trends suggest a broader enterprise movement toward reducing single-vendor dependency through adoption of mixed on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments.
Industry analysts anticipate these patterns will accelerate. Gartner projected that 55 percent of enterprises will conduct evaluations of alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure products by 2029, compared to 25 percent earlier this year.
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