Many VMware customers still cling to the belief that, sooner or later, everything will return to a certain level of normalcy. That the noise will subside, licensing changes will stabilize, and the market will adapt without too many surprises. However, increasing signs suggest that this view is too simplistic. What Broadcom is doing with VMware doesn’t seem like a temporary period of disorder but rather a well-defined strategy to capture the most profitable part of the business and refrain from investing resources in segments it no longer considers a priority.
Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware for $69 billion in November 2023, one of the largest tech deals in recent years. Since then, the group has made clear its focus on VMware Cloud Foundation as a key pillar for private and hybrid cloud, transitioning from perpetual licensing to subscription models, and adopting a more selective approach with customers and partners. Concurrently, its corporate documentation emphasizes that its software clients tend to be large enterprises with complex, multi-cloud environments, rather than the mass market.
This detail matters because it helps explain why so many medium-sized companies today feel out of the loop. The issue is not just rising costs or simplified product catalogs. The real problem is that Broadcom appears to have redefined who deserves strategic attention and who does not.
Fewer products, fewer partners, and greater concentration
By December 2023, the company had already advocated for a radical simplification of VMware’s offerings, aiming to focus the business on fewer packages, all under subscription. Broadcom phased out much of the product mosaic and guided clients toward bundles like VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation. On paper, this move was to reduce complexity, but in practice, it increased economic pressure on many environments that didn’t require such extensive packages.
Consolidation has also impacted the channel. In January 2025, Broadcom announced that it would strengthen its commitment to a select group of “value-based” partners—those more aligned with its vision and capable of investing in specialization, services, and customer success. By 2026, the company further reduced the number of authorized partners in certain geographies and programs, leading to a formal complaint from CISPE to the European Commission regarding the impact of these changes on European cloud providers.
It’s therefore no surprise that the mid-market—businesses with a few hundred or a few thousand virtual machines—begins to interpret these moves not as operational adjustments but as a deliberate sieve. Forrester already predicted in 2023 that 20% of VMware’s enterprise clients would start leaving the platform in 2024, driven by fears of price hikes, poorer support, and forced subscriptions to oversized bundles. In 2024 and 2025, this view persisted: the disruption caused by the acquisition was pushing a significant part of the market to explore alternatives.
Broadcom’s message is clear: fewer customers, but larger ones
Broadcom isn’t hiding this logic entirely. Hock Tan, the group’s CEO, stated in 2025 that more than 87% of its top 10,000 clients had already adopted VMware Cloud Foundation. That statement says much more than it appears: the KPI the company emphasizes isn’t total ecosystem retention but penetration within its largest 10,000 accounts. That’s where the focus lies. The priority doesn’t seem to be serving the entire market better but rather maximizing revenue and recurrence within the most lucrative segment.
Viewed this way, the current situation resembles less chaos and more a tough but coherent reorganization aligned with Broadcom’s recent history. Reuters recalls that the group built its software expansion through acquisitions such as CA Technologies for $18.9 billion and the enterprise business of Symantec for $10.7 billion; integrating mature assets and directing them toward cash flow and large clients. VMware fits well within this sequence.
For many medium-sized companies, the consequence is obvious: migration is no longer just a technical or philosophical decision but an urgent financial decision. Renewals do not always mean continuity; sometimes they involve accepting a cost structure, packages, and dependencies that no longer match the project’s actual scale.
Proxmox, private cloud, and a solution that no longer sounds marginal
At this point, proposals like Proxmox VE and exclusive private cloud models have gained prominence. Stackscale (Grupo Aire), a European provider of private cloud infrastructure and bare-metal services, has offered since 2025 a dedicated service to migrate from VMware to Proxmox, including pre-evaluation, pilot testing, machine conversion, and deployment on dedicated infrastructure in Europe. The company also markets private cloud solutions using Proxmox or VMware, framing VMware as an opportunity not only for a hypervisor switch but for redesigning networks, storage, backup, and continuity on a more predictable architecture less dependent on vendor lock-in.
David Carrero, co-founder of Stackscale, summarizes it as follows: “Waiting for VMware to normalize means misunderstanding the game. Broadcom isn’t fixing a transition; it’s filtering which clients it wants and which it doesn’t. And that forces many companies to make a decision now, not in two renewal cycles.”
Carrero also notes that the tone of the conversation has shifted rapidly: “Previously, many companies evaluated migration for flexibility or technological philosophy. Now, they assess it based on budget, renewal risk, and operational control. It’s a much more executive-level conversation than a technical one.”
According to him, Stackscale is already assisting hundreds of companies in this transition—not just for moving from VMware to Proxmox but to seize the opportunity, shifting workloads on-premise to a private cloud infrastructure often driven by needs for continuity, cost predictability, and data sovereignty.
The conclusion may be uncomfortable for those still expecting a return to VMware as it was years ago. Broadcom doesn’t seem interested in rebuilding that broad market relationship. It’s more likely focused on creating a more profitable, more bundled VMware, aligned with large accounts and less interested in the intermediate segment. For some clients, that might be manageable; for many others, the window to strategize an exit is already open.