I’ve spent the last several months in rooms with the people living through the VMware transition. Fortune 100 CIOs, enterprise IT leaders, systems integrators and the partners caught in the middle.
One dinner has stuck with me. A room full of senior IT leaders, every one of them running VMware. Not one of them has fully embraced it. They’ve all moved to subscription pricing because they had to, not because they chose to. The sentiment around that table wasn’t satisfaction, and it wasn’t quite anger. It was the feeling of being cornered. Skepticism about a vendor they can’t easily walk away from, running deeper than I expected two years in.
That feeling has a name in the trade press right now. Held hostage. Trapped. And the panic underneath it is real. I’m not going to tell you it isn’t.
The questions I field now aren’t abstract. They’re a CIO looking me in the eye asking what the next renewal looks like, because nobody knows, and that uncertainty is doing more damage than the price increases themselves.
One person from CloudBolt’s January 2026 survey of 302 enterprise IT decision-makers put the stakes about as plainly as it gets: this is the kind of pressure that can cost you your job.
But I’m here to say the hostage framing is wrong, and believing it costs you.
Why the Exit Isn’t a Single Decision
When Broadcom took 8,000 SKUs down to four and eliminated every other purchasing option, the enterprises that wanted to stay on VMware moved to subscription. Broadcom calls it adoption, but there’s a difference between choosing the only item on the menu and wanting it.
The room feels cornered rather than merely annoyed because the exit isn’t a single decision.
VMware has never sat in one place where you could simply remove it. It became the way compute, storage, networking, disaster recovery, and a decade of operational habit fit together.
When teams test alternatives, they don’t fail on the hypervisor. They fail in the seams. The DR runbook that assumes VMware. The identity model wired into it. The backup integration nobody documented. The automation built over ten years that only speaks to one platform.
And the people who knew those seams best are often gone. I talked to one enterprise running hundreds of applications on legacy infrastructure, some of it over a decade old, where the engineers who built those systems have retired, or worse. They’re stretching hardware into its sixth and seventh year because the economics of every alternative still look uncertain.
Meanwhile, the partner ecosystem that used to help navigate VMware’s world has been gutted.
The veterans who knew the ins and outs were laid off. So, enterprises are making the most complex infrastructure decision of the decade with fewer trusted advisors than they’ve had in years.
From the outside that reads as panic, but up close it’s more specific: the cost was never the renewal quote—it’s everything the renewal quote is holding in place.
The mass-exit story never matched what’s actually happening. In that same research, only 4% had completed a full migration away from VMware. The largest group reported staying with VMware while actively reducing dependence. More than half had changed their strategy two or more times since the acquisition.
That isn’t a market in panic, and it isn’t a market sitting still. It’s a market reducing exposure deliberately, workload by workload, while keeping the business running on the platform it’s trying to leave.
The pressure is real, and it’s personal. Forty-one percent told us executive pressure had intensified since the acquisition, not eased, with the CEO, the board, and the CFO named most often as the source. When that pressure has nowhere productive to go, it begins to feel like captivity.
Waiting Is the Expensive Part
So, I understand why “held hostage” lands. But if you believe you’re a hostage, you wait for rescue. You wait for a better price, a clean alternative, someone else to move first. Waiting is the most expensive thing an enterprise can do right now. The teams that reduced exposure early kept their leverage and got to sequence their own decisions. The teams that waited are negotiating against renewal deadlines with a larger trapped footprint and less time. The posture itself produces paralysis that makes the next renewal worse.
The infrastructure leaders I talk to aren’t paralyzed because they’re complacent or behind.
Reading their reluctance as backwardness is wrong, and it’s insulting to people making this call with leaner teams and fewer advisors than they had two years ago. Their caution is rational.
They’re refusing to trade a known constraint for an unknown one just to look decisive.
What Progress Actually Looks Like
The work that’s actually paying off is unglamorous. Map where the dependence is concentrated before the pressure forces the question. Stop net-new workloads from defaulting back to VMware, so the footprint stops growing while you work the rest. Measure exposure reduction quarter by quarter instead of holding out for the clean cutover that may never come. None of that is rescue. It’s the opposite of waiting.
The panic in that dinner conversation was honest. These are serious people facing a hard squeeze, and the emotion is earned. But “held hostage” describes people with no agency, and the ones making real progress are the ones who rejected that story early and started moving while they still had room to choose how.
The squeeze is real, but most of the captivity is a choice.
