35 percent of VMware workloads expected to migrate elsewhere by 2028

VMware will lose a significant chunk of business over the next three years, according to Gartner research VP Julia Palmer.

Of course, some organizations have already abandoned VMware or are plotting partial or total migrations. Broadcom acquired the virtualization business in November 2023 and made sweeping changes that alienated many customers. The biggest concerns have been higher costs driven by a shift from perpetual licenses to subscriptions and the bundling of products into fewer, more expensive SKUs and a reduction in the number of channel partners that are allowed to resell VMware technologies. The new VMware business model favors large organizations, forcing many small- to medium-sized businesses to explore alternatives.

However, the wave of departures that Palmer spoke of today at Gartner’s IT Symposium in Gold Coast, Australia, comes from customers who use VMware technology through hyperscalers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), as reported by The Register. Soon after its acquisition, Broadcom made it so that hyperscalers are unable to resell VMware subscriptions to customers using hyperscaler cloud services that rely on VMware. Because of this change, 35 percent of VMware workloads will migrate elsewhere by 2028, Palmer predicted, noting that hyperscalers will push their customers to the public cloud.

In a June 2024 blog post, VMware said the changes around selling VMware licenses for hyperscaler cloud environments are about ensuring consistency and driving customer “flexibility and choice.” The move also pushed more customers to buy VMware from Broadcom directly, giving Broadcom a bigger piece of the deal.