There is a particular kind of customer satisfaction survey where the headline finding is that almost everyone would like to leave. The VMware ecosystem just got one of those. As Scharon Harding reported for Ars Technica, a new survey — run by Unisphere Research in partnership with Rimini Street, and titled, with survey-industry poetry, “2026 IT Virtualization Survey: What’s Next for VMware Users” — finds that licensing costs have 90 percent of VMware users exploring their options. Ninety percent. If you ran a restaurant and 90 percent of your diners were reading other menus mid-meal, you might ask some questions about the kitchen.
The background here is not subtle. Broadcom bought VMware in late 2023 and promptly did the thing acquirers of entrenched enterprise software do: it ended perpetual licenses, shoved customers into big subscription bundles and generally re-priced the privilege of staying put. CIO has catalogued customers reporting increases of 150, 300, even 500 percent; one told Business Insider the experience “feels quite a bit like being held for ransom.” Imagine you run a company that has spent a decade building its data centers on one vendor’s hypervisor. Your entire estate — every workload, every automation script, every sysadmin’s muscle memory — speaks VMware. Then the new owner of that vendor calls and says the rent is tripling, but also, you’re free to leave. You are, technically, free to leave. Nobody physically stops you from leaving.
That is the actual mechanism at the heart of the survey results, and it explains why “exploring options” and “switching” are not the same verb. Migration is slow, risky and expensive, which is precisely what makes the licensing strategy work. So the customers respond the only way they can — not with a dramatic exit, but with diversification at the margin. Rimini reported that 60 percent of surveyed organizations are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, what it described as “growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals.” Another 47 percent are favoring a hybrid setup of hypervisors plus containers — “‘best of both worlds’ workload placement,” per the announcement. And 48 percent aren’t planning to move any of their assets to VMware’s hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation — which is to say, nearly half are declining to buy the new bundle from the vendor whose old bundle they’re trying to escape.
Gartner, which gets paid to put words to this sort of thing, has a phrase for the emotion. Tony Harvey, a senior director analyst there, previously told Ars that “many clients are looking … at this [as] a wake-up call to how dependent they had become on a single vendor and are looking for more diversity in their on-premises environments.” A wake-up call. The wake-up call cost $69 billion for Broadcom, and is being itemized, quarterly, for everyone else. In its “Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure,” released last month, Gartner predicted 55 percent of enterprises will make proofs of concept for alternative products to replace their VMware-based deployments by 2029, up from 25 percent in 2026. Note what that prediction actually says: not that 55 percent will leave, but that 55 percent will build a demo of what leaving might look like. In enterprise IT, the proof of concept is the thought experiment you conduct while continuing to pay the invoice.
Rimini’s own framing, in the announcement, is that “the trend shows increasing diversification in enterprise virtualization strategies with a longer-term transition toward bespoke, multi-platform IT virtualization environments,” as organizations mix on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, public cloud and alternative hypervisors. Translated: nobody trusts a single vendor to be the price-maker in their data center any more, so they’re deliberately making their own architecture messier in order to regain the negotiating position. There is a cost to that mess — the survey’s respondents cite operational complexity as a top barrier — but apparently the complexity of running two hypervisors is now priced as cheaper than the simplicity of running one at the new list price. That is a remarkable sentence to be able to type.
“[The survey] reflects a broader effort by enterprises to reduce dependency on a single provider, maintain continuity for mission-critical systems and modernize at a pace that fits their own business requirements,” Joe McKendrick, lead analyst at Unisphere Research, said in a statement today. “For many organizations, that means balancing support for existing environments with new investments designed to improve resilience, security and scalability over time.” “At a pace that fits their own business requirements” is doing heroic work in that sentence; the pace fits their business requirements in roughly the way a hostage’s itinerary fits his travel plans.
One disclosure-shaped wrinkle worth keeping in view: Rimini Street is a third-party support provider for VMware software, which means it has a commercial interest in VMware customers concluding that they don’t need to buy everything from VMware. That doesn’t make 90 percent a wrong number — Gartner’s independent prediction points the same direction — but it does mean the survey’s sponsor would like you to know about the survey.
Anyway. The endgame here is probably not a mass exodus; switching costs are sticky for a reason, and Broadcom knows its arithmetic. The endgame is a data center running three hypervisors, a container platform and a proof of concept, maintained by a team that describes all of it as “best of both worlds.”