Comdivision spent 20 years building VMware environments without selling a single license. Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, followed by changes to the VMware partner program, product packaging and commercial model, prompted some channel partners, including Germany-based comdivision, to reassess their services, alliances and role in helping customers plan their next infrastructure move.
The 30-person, Germany-based professional services firm said it remained tied to VMware until Broadcom required partners to own hardware and operate data centers. That didn't work for comdivision CEO Yves Sandfort, so he pivoted to a new business model. Instead of renting licenses to smaller cloud service providers (CSPs), Sandfort said his company began reselling VMware licenses to customers, often in partnership with former Broadcom partners. It was new territory, but Sandfort described it as a necessary adaptation for his business.
"We started from zero," Sandfort told The Forecast in July. "With the new approach, we can still provide consulting services for CSPs, but we are not going to be the ones who own the hardware or operate the data centers. That's never been our business, and never will be."
After Broadcom closed its $69 billion VMware acquisition in late 2023, it quickly refocused its channel partner program. CRN reported an estimate that roughly 40% of VMware’s former partner base — about 12,000 companies, based on a reported total of 30,000 — was no longer participating after the program changes. Broadcom now only allows partners to be resellers or CSPs. Many former partners adjusted their business models around migration services, multi-vendor alliances and hybrid cloud strategies. In early October, The Register reported that IBM sold hundreds of its VMware customers to Broadcom partner 11:11 Systems.
VMware had been deeply embedded in many enterprise virtualization environments, but post-acquisition price increases, bundled subscriptions and licensing changes drew widespread complaints. In a January 2026 CloudBolt survey, 88% of respondents described the acquisition as disruptive. Resellers and IT service providers interviewed for this article see these sentiments firsthand.
How Are VMware by Broadcom Product Changes Catalyzing IT Decision Makers?
Customers are also assessing the implications of VMware’s VMware Cloud Foundation packaging. Customers affected by the applicable VMware vSphere 8 lifecycle milestone (vSphere 8, ESXi 8 and vCenter Server 8.0 reach end of general support on October 11, 2027, with technical guidance running to October 11, 2029) are assessing its implications. Customers that don't transition before that date risk running without updates and patches that are often critical to maintaining security and, in regulated sectors, compliance.
What was once a series of reactive, cost-mitigation decisions around lifecycle issues has now become business-critical assessments about the future, according to Ron Westfall, lead analyst for HyperFRAME's Edge, Infrastructure and Networking research practice.
All of these VMware changes have turned “into a proactive catalyst for deciding whether to commit long-term to Broadcom's bundled ecosystem, or execute a structured shift toward alternative hybrid infrastructure platforms," Westfall said in a Q&A with The Forecast.
Westfall described the deadline as accelerating hybrid AI deployment timelines.
"By forcing a re-architecting of core data centers, the October 2027 deadline is unexpectedly accelerating hybrid AI deployment timelines, since organizations are opting to replace legacy VMware infrastructure with unified, container-native platforms that can instantly accommodate production AI inference alongside traditional virtualized workloads,” he said.
Whether or not that’s the intended consequence, many customers are deciding whether to remain with VMware, migrate elsewhere or adopt some blend of mix.
IT decision makers were cautious at first, but that gave them time to make smarter decisions, according to Anthony Jackman, Chief Innovation Officer at Expedient, an intelligence infrastructure service that partners with VMware and Nutanix.
“2025 was the year of the frozen deal that just never happened,” Jackman told The Forecast. “They just were waiting. That gave everybody a year to really think through what they wanted. And then this year, everything seems to have picked back up even in the face of the rapidly increasing costs, specifically hardware.”
Jackman said the substantial consolidation of VMware providers is catalyzing.
“It's definitely led to some increased business for us, absorbing existing VMware workloads,” Jackman said. “Those providers had clients that were with them for years and now that's not available anymore.”
When new customers come to Expedient, they get options for moving forward with VMware or moving to a different infrastructure software platform.
“Fortunately for us, we have a very strong partnership with Nutanix. We support the entire stack, and we do it at a large scale," Jackman said. "And we've been doing it for years. So the confidence level is there for those clients.”
Stay, Leave, or Mix: Who Can Guide You Through the VMware Crossroads?
Channel partners have become critical, unbiased intermediaries guiding IT decision-makers through risk evaluations, according to Westfall. He described how the channel bifurcated, with some authorized partners now concentrating on VCF deployment and post-sales use, while a broader group helps customers assess and execute migrations.
"Rather than choosing isolated software tools, organizations rely on this channel ecosystem to deploy validated, joint-vendor architectures, such as Nutanix integrated with Everpure or Cisco FlashStack solutions, which preserve existing hardware investments while establishing a modern operational plane," Westfall explained.
Some customers may conclude that staying with VMware is less disruptive or more economical than migrating, explained Juan Orlandini, CTO of North America at Insight, a global solutions integrator that offers VMware and Nutanix software. Orlandini spoke with The Forecast in August, prior to a CRN report that Insight, an $8.2 billion solution provider and award-winning VMware Pinnacle partner, could no longer resell VMware licenses or Broadcom-funded VCF Entitlement Services. He explained that large enterprises and highly regulated organizations may have years of automation, security, audit documentation, high-availability designs and operating processes tied to the platform.
"VMware's technology is not the problem," Orlandini told The Forecast in August. "The big question is whether customers can use enough of VCF's broader stack to justify its price."
VCF is a collection of software for managing a private cloud, but Orlandini said customers may not want to pay for the capabilities they neither want nor use. Customers that use only a fraction of those capabilities may struggle to make the math work, he said, while those prepared to put them to use may reach a different conclusion.
Then there are customers whose VMware dependencies would be costly or risky to migrate to and rebuild on a different software platform, Sandfort explained.
"The challenge [of leaving VMware] comes once you start utilizing additional features like high availability, security, automation and other things," Sandfort said. "And that's where the whole story starts."
What Does an 'Intentional' Exit from VMware Look Like?
For other customers, analysis will point toward an exit, and that exit should be deliberate rather than reflexive, advised Orlandini. He said that is more likely to happen in smaller IT organizations that employ generalists and may lack the skills or appetite to consume the VCF bundle.
Orlandini sees initial anger giving way to more deliberate planning. The early, reflexive departures, which he calls "angry exits," have faded after the first wave of customers confronted the amount of work a full migration entails.
"Customers that are choosing to exit from Broadcom, the VMware technology stack, are a real opportunity for us," Orlandini said. "We tell them, 'it's okay to exit, but be intentional about it.'"
Intent begins with the workloads, he explained. Know what applications are doing, which capabilities are required and where they should run now and in the near future. Some customers may need several technologies to reproduce the networking, compute, clustering, availability and other capabilities they use today. The assessment must also account for people and processes, he said.
"Is my staff even able to absorb that change?" Orlandini asked. "Do I have the right kind of staff? Are my processes built around being able to make that kind of a change?"
Migration, therefore, becomes a business and operating-model decision as much as a technical one, explained Westfall.
Westfall said enterprise buyers are increasingly turning to displaced resellers, value-added distributors and multicloud partners to navigate rising “licensing costs, assess migration risks and re-architect their stacks around alternatives."
That demand is pushing partners beyond product resale into migration assessments, training, managed services and joint-vendor designs that preserve useful infrastructure. Westfall expects such alliances to play a central role, with partners combining platforms, storage, networking and migration tools into tested offers rather than asking customers to replace every layer at once.
Orlandini said preserving existing investments may help customers manage the operational and financial demands of a migration. He added that changing fewer systems at once may make the transition easier to manage, depending on the customer’s environment.
Can a Mixed-Vendor Strategy Meet Existing Dependencies with New Needs?
Many IT teams will opt to retain VMware for some workloads while moving others to new platforms. They may retain VMware for highly automated, regulated or sensitive workloads while moving simpler applications to other platforms and placing new container or AI projects elsewhere, explained Orlandini.
He said a mixed model can reduce near-term migration risk while giving customers time to build the infrastructure they will need next. Virtual machines will remain for years, even as containers and AI workloads spread across private data centers, colocation facilities, public clouds and the edge.
That mixed approach is already taking hold. The CloudBolt survey found that 54% of enterprise IT leaders were staying with VMware but actively reducing their dependence through phased, partial transitions. Gartner reported that 35% of VMware workloads could move to alternative platforms by 2028 as organizations weigh cost, complexity and the demands of AI.
"You have legacy workloads, and you need to keep them, and you need to operate them, and you need to foster them because your business depends on them," Sandfort said.
Are IT Services Providers Enabling More Cross-Functional IT Teams?
These changes have given customers another reason to redraw old organizational boundaries. Orlandini said traditional virtualization teams often managed servers, storage and networking in separate silos. A true private cloud requires a more cross-functional, API-first model that can deliver services across virtual machines and containers.
"This Broadcom change has created a forcing function that is allowing IT organizations to revisit how they've built their processes and their tools and the services that they provide," he said.
Partners that can connect those pieces may be better positioned to support customers, he said. They will need broader vendor relationships and deeper services, but they must also be willing to recommend against a product when it does not fit the customer.
"It's not an agnostic approach," Orlandini said. "It's an informed, opinionated approach that clients are looking for."
Editor’s note: Like more topics covered by The Forecast, this story continues to evolve. On September 16, The Register reported “VMware swings its focus back to low-end server virt, promises vSphere Standard upgrade – Found the time to focus and ‘corrected’ incentives that saw sales drive users to full private clouds.
David Rand is a business and technology reporter whose work has appeared in major publications around the world. He specializes in spotting and digging into what’s coming next–and helping executives in organizations of all sizes know what to do about it.
Ken Kaplan contributed to this story. He is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan and LinkedIn.
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