VMware Exit: Beyond Cost, A Drive for Control

Broadcom's 2023 acquisition of VMware has significantly altered the European cloud market, prompting widespread concern over vendor lock-in and IT dependency. Some customers faced drastic price increases, soaring up to 1,500%, serving as a stark warning against relying on inflexible, closed cloud systems. This situation has spurred a strategic reassessment of virtualization and cloud platforms.

Organizations are increasingly recognizing VMware exit and platform migration as opportunities for modernization and innovation, rather than mere cost-cutting. The transition to open, modular, and vendor-neutral infrastructure allows for enhanced efficiency, flexibility, and control over systems, data, strategy, and budgets. This shift is further accelerated by two critical forces: sovereignty and artificial intelligence.

Digital sovereignty has evolved beyond regulatory compliance to become a core operational requirement, especially in the EU and UK. As data protection rules tighten, businesses need guarantees of direct control over data location, access, and governance, making proprietary virtualization stacks a point of concern for long-term autonomy. Similarly, the expanding use of AI, particularly GPU-dependent workloads, necessitates infrastructure that offers greater adaptability in configuration, sharing, and scaling.

Many organizations are discovering that their AI initiatives are intrinsically linked to their migration plans. The platform chosen today will dictate the ease of GPU management, workload isolation, and the speed of adopting new AI tools. A rushed migration from one proprietary system to another is ill-advised, often leading to duplicated complexity and new sets of challenges. Instead, a well-planned transition to enterprise-ready, open, and sovereign solutions is crucial, requiring at least six months for preparation and initial workload migration.