The view of Broadcom is that VMWare has low growth potential and the route to maximum short term financial returns is to extract as much money as possible from the largest customers.
So the strategy is to squeeze the 600 largest customers until they bleed, knowing they are so entrenched they cannot easily migrate. If the next couple of thousand stuck around as well that would be nice, but not essential. The long tail of hundreds of thousands of customers paying a few dollars a month they would gladly be rid of.
The last project I was working on at a major telcom before jumping ship was a project to migrate off of VMware onto KVM systems managed by Cloud Stack, they already have a major Open Stack environment but that's only for SDN stuff now.
We're talking over 10,000 ESXi hosts in the current footprint and at least 50% of them will be off VMware by the end of 2026.
If they were smart, the people they would be focusing on squeezing are the mid-sized shops that don't have the in-house skills or top level cost focus to force a migration. The small shops can't afford to stay on vmware, the very large shops will have the in-house skills or contract to the right people to get moved, it's the mid-sized people that are most stuck.
How do you know this is their view? I don't have any strong opinion or evidence to argue, but I'm curious if this is conjecture or inference or actual knowledge?
So the strategy is to squeeze the 600 largest customers until they bleed, knowing they are so entrenched they cannot easily migrate. If the next couple of thousand stuck around as well that would be nice, but not essential. The long tail of hundreds of thousands of customers paying a few dollars a month they would gladly be rid of.