In the last few weeks, Broadcom dropped another 2,500 VMware resellers from its partner program, bringing the total down from 4,000 to 1,500. I’ve been watching this process unfold since they acquired VMware, and while everyone else is complaining about the 3x to 10x pricing increases, I’m seeing something different entirely.
This market disruption is the best thing that’s happened to enterprise virtualization in decades.
VMware used to be the automatic choice—the technology equivalent of “nobody gets fired for buying IBM.” For twenty years, if you thought enterprise virtualization, you thought VMware. They owned every vertical, served every use case, and dominated so completely that Microsoft was maybe a distant second at best.
But here’s what I’ve learned from working with hundreds of customers through this transition: when a vendor that is universal suddenly focuses on just their top 10-20% of accounts, it unleashes innovation. It allows niche players to emerge, flourish, and super-serve segments that may have even forgotten the extent to which they had been making do with a general product.
The Hyper-Converged Play Gets Real
I’m watching Nutanix capitalize on something VMware customers have been thinking about for years. These organizations wanted virtualization that didn’t require cobbling together multiple vendors and managing the seams between hardware platforms and virtual workloads. VMware was good at virtualization, but it wasn’t built for that integrated approach.
Nutanix was, but they didn’t just wait for displaced customers to find them. They created Move—a specific migration tool that makes the transition from VMware to their hardware-software stack turnkey. The customers I work with who were already leaning toward hyper-convergence found that Broadcom’s pricing changes didn’t just push them to consider Nutanix—it accelerated decisions they’d been circling for months.
Container Plans Become Immediate Reality
Here’s something interesting I’m seeing across my client base: containerization has been on every enterprise roadmap for years, but most teams planned to adopt it gradually. They’d run containers alongside their existing VMware environments during some lengthy transition period.
Broadcom compressed those timelines overnight. Companies that were planning container adoption “eventually” suddenly had financial incentive to consolidate now. Red Hat was ready with OpenShift’s virtualization platform that supports both traditional VMs and containerized workloads under the same architecture.
What might have been a two or three-year dual-stack period—running both VMware and container platforms with overlapping costs—became a single platform migration. Faster, cleaner, and without the cost overlap of maintaining two solutions.
Edge Players Move to Core
Scale Computing built their reputation on edge-first virtualization—remote offices, branch deployments, and lightweight environments where VMware wasn’t purpose-built. But when Broadcom vacated 80-90% of the market, Scale saw an opening to expand into full data center virtualization.
Now organizations can standardize on a single software-defined platform that handles both core and edge workloads. The customers I work with who started with Scale at the edge can stay with them as they build out broader virtualized environments, eliminating the complexity of managing multiple platforms across different infrastructure tiers.
Purpose-Built Beats One-Size-Fits-All
Every vendor I’m tracking is sharpening their product for specific customer needs rather than trying to be everything to everyone. HPE rapidly introduced Virtual Machine Essentials for customers seeking straightforward alternatives. Each player stopped trying to recreate and compete with VMware’s universal approach and started being the best solution for their particular segment.
This reverses decades of category-wide feature creep and platform bloat. VMware’s dominance was built on doing it all, which meant it was good for everything but optimized for nothing specific. Now customers can choose platforms purpose-built for their requirements instead of configuring general tools to fit specific needs.
Market Specialization Drives Innovation
I’ve been in this industry long enough to remember when we had real competition and innovation in virtualization. What’s emerging now feels like that era returning. Broadcom made a business decision to focus on their highest-margin accounts—a legitimate strategy for maximizing shareholder value.
What I’m seeing in the field contradicts every angry article about Broadcom’s moves. Yes, pricing disrupted established relationships. Yes, organizations had to make unexpected decisions. But the outcome is a more dynamic, competitive, and innovative virtualization market than we’ve had in years.
Organizations that relied on VMware’s one-size-fits-all approach now have access to platforms purpose-built for their specific requirements. Vendors that were constrained by competing against a universal solution can now optimize for the customers they serve best.
Sometimes the market needs disruption to evolve. Broadcom provided exactly that disruption, and while their focus shifted to financial optimization, the unintended consequence was technological renaissance. The virtualization market just got interesting again—and that benefits everyone except the vendors who were comfortable with the status quo.
