The ongoing shift away from VMware following its acquisition by Broadcom has 86% of companies actively working to reduce their reliance on VMware products. A recent study by CloudBolt indicates that while the immediate panic phase has subsided, organizations are still unwinding their dependencies in a careful, workload-by-workload manner. Research shows that 73% of customers anticipated a doubling of VMware costs, yet only 5% have experienced such increases. Moreover, 56% of respondents have altered their VMware strategies multiple times since the acquisition, with many opting for public cloud infrastructure as a primary alternative.
And from Channel Dive. As Broadcom restructures VMware’s Cloud Service Provider program, 11:11 Systems is strategically positioning itself to acquire former VMware partners, enhancing its offerings in the managed infrastructure space. The New Jersey-based company recently acquired Digital Sense, an Australian cloud service provider, marking its seventh acquisition in this segment and its tenth overall. This move allows 11:11 Systems to expand its reach across the Asia-Pacific region while providing continuity and stability for customers transitioning from VMware’s changing partner landscape.
Why do we care?
The calm in the VMware story is a timing artifact. Broadcom’s pricing restructuring is renewal-triggered, and the organizations that haven’t hit that cycle yet aren’t stable — they’re in the quiet period before the conversation gets real. MSPs who read the subsided panic as a signal to deprioritize these clients will find themselves excluded from the most consequential infrastructure decisions their clients make this decade.
The public cloud default is the other problem nobody is pricing. Lifting VMware workloads into AWS or Azure without re-architecting means paying cloud margins on top of VM overhead. That’s survivable for 12 months. At 24 months it becomes a budget crisis — and the MSP who didn’t flag it early gets no credit for identifying it late.
The deeper issue is that Broadcom didn’t just raise prices — it simultaneously broke trust with its entire partner ecosystem. The companies winning right now are positioned to receive that transferred trust, not just offer a technical alternative. Showing up with a hypervisor comparison sheet misses the point entirely. The client’s actual problem is that their relationship with their infrastructure partner was invalidated without warning.
Map every client’s renewal date now. Model cost trajectories before the vendor invoice arrives. Renewal intelligence is a competitive moat — the MSP who anticipates becomes the strategic partner. The one who reacts becomes the implementer.
For fifteen years, managed services assumed vendor predictability — stable licensing, stable policy, stable federal backing. That assumption is breaking. If your service design still assumes stability, you’re exposed.