After chipmaker Broadcom acquired virtualization platform VMware, Broadcom canceled its previous permanent licensing policy and changed it to a subscription system, and companies may also need to purchase bundles. These policies caused dissatisfaction among many companies. As a leading company in the virtualization industry, when VMware was independent, when it was acquired by EMC, when it was acquired by Dell, and when it was independently listed, it did not make major changes to its licensing policy, and there was no dissatisfaction for long-term customers using VMware.
The radical measures taken by Broadcom after acquiring VMware directly made the entire virtualization and cloud computing industry share the same hatred. For large enterprises, subscription and bundling may not be a problem, but for small and medium-sized enterprises, the cost of use will increase significantly.
Therefore, many companies in Europe have begun to complain to the EU, accusing EU regulators of why they agreed to Broadcom's acquisition of VMware in the first place. But now it may be too late for the EU to regret it, and it cannot force VMware to be split from Broadcom again.
However, the more practical option for more enterprises is to run away, that is, to migrate to alternative virtualization platforms that are more customer-friendly, including Nutanix and Proxmox VE, which have gained a large number of new customers after Broadcom acquired VMware.
Nutanix CEO said in a recent interview with the media that approximately 30,000 enterprise customers have migrated from VMware platforms to Nutanix, indicating that customers are dissatisfied with Broadcom's VMware strategy.
The company said customers were dissatisfied with Broadcom's higher prices, forced bundling, licensing changes and increasingly strained partnerships, which led directly to customers abandoning VMware and switching to alternative platforms.
Nutanix didn't specify how many of the customers migrating from VMware were SMBs or large enterprises, but Western Union, a financial firm that has successfully migrated to Nutanix, may be a typical customer.