Nearly 86 percent of organizations are actively reducing their reliance on VMware, according to a recent report from CloudBolt, as enterprises grapple with the fallout from Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of the virtualization giant.
The shift comes after Broadcom implemented significant changes to VMware’s pricing, licensing, and partner programs, sparking widespread dissatisfaction among customers, particularly small- and medium-sized businesses. Gartner previously forecast that 35 percent of VMware workloads would migrate to alternative platforms by 2028, a prediction that appears to be gaining momentum.
Currently, 36 percent of organizations surveyed by CloudBolt have migrated between 1 and 24 percent of their VMware environment, while another 32 percent have moved between 25 and 49 percent. A smaller, but still significant, 10 percent have migrated over half of their workloads, with 2 percent having moved 75 percent or more. Only 5 percent of respondents reported no migration activity.
The primary destination for these migrated workloads is public cloud infrastructure as a service, with 72 percent of respondents choosing this route. Microsoft’s Hyper-V/Azure Stack is also a popular alternative, attracting 43 percent of those migrating away from VMware.
Despite the widespread desire to reduce VMware’s footprint, the process is not without its challenges. CloudBolt’s report identifies multi-platform complexity, affecting 52 percent of organizations, and skills gaps, impacting 33 percent, as the biggest hurdles to migration. “As organizations diversify away from VMware, they inherit the operational burden of managing multiple platforms with different operational and governance models,” the report states.
Broadcom’s strategy, according to CloudBolt, appears to be focused on maximizing value from remaining customers, even if it means accepting churn. “Their strategy was never to keep every customer,” the report reads. “It was to maximize value from those still on the platform while the market slowly diversifies. The model assumes churn and it’s built to make the economics perform anyway. Broadcom has done the math—and they’re fine with it.”
Broadcom was recognized as a leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure for the third consecutive year, according to VMware Blogs. The recognition is based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), which aims to deliver public cloud scale with private cloud security.
