2 Years After Broadcom Destroyed VMware: Where Did Everything Land? [video]
Two years after Broadcom's acquisition and restructuring of VMware, the video examines the fallout including major price hikes, licensing changes, customer migration, and the broader impact on the virtualization and enterprise IT market.
Background
- Broadcom, a chip and infrastructure software giant, acquired VMware (a dominant datacenter virtualization company) for $69 billion in November 2023. Since then, Broadcom has radically changed VMware's business: it killed perpetual licenses, forced subscriptions, raised prices 2-5x, ended support for the free ESXi hypervisor, and fired thousands of employees while dropping many partner/reseller contracts.
- The video analyzes where VMware's massive installed base has ended up two years later: some customers swallowed the price hikes, many are actively migrating to alternatives like Nutanix, Proxmox, and Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, and a secondary market in used VMware licenses has emerged.
- This matters because VMware was essentially the default for enterprise virtualization — used by 90%+ of Fortune 500 companies. Broadcom's moves represent an unprecedented forced migration of enterprise infrastructure, creating both a crisis for IT budgets and a massive opportunity for competitors and the open-source ecosystem.