Over the past few months, there’s been plenty of analysis around Broadcom Inc.’s acquisition of VMware Inc., including on multiple episodes of theCUBE Podcast. During Google Cloud Next 2024, that analysis continued.

Since the acquisition took place, interest hasn’t died down, according to Paul Delory (pictured), vice president, analyst and research portfolio manager at Gartner Inc. There have been a lot of people who have been upset.

“Their concern prior to the acquisition was that there were going to be large-scale price increases,” Delory said. “Some of that has been borne out. The story is more complicated than that, because the price for your VMware licenses depends on where you started.

Delory was joined by John Furrier, theCUBE Research executive analyst, and fellow analyst Rebecca Knight, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom and its implications for customers. (* Disclosure below.)

The impacts of VMware’s SKU changes

VMware has consolidated all of its SKUs down to essentially two, according to Delory. There’s the VMware Cloud Foundation and the VMware vSphere Foundation.

“Both of those include ESXI and vSAN. If you go to VCF, you’re also getting parts of NSX. You’re getting parts of [Aria Suite]. They’re both now bundle SKUs,” Delory said. “VMware is sort of pushing everyone into there. And their clear preference is to get you into that top-level Cadillac SKU for VCF. So, your reaction to that depends on where you started.”

There were a lot of customers that were already running VCF and already on subscription services, and there were a lot of customers getting their VMware licenses through a cloud provider. In those cases, this might not be a big change, according to Delory.

“The problem is, if you were using one of those older SKUs that got eliminated, so if you were running vSphere Standard or vSphere+, or one of those older, more bare-bone SKUs, if you’re getting uplifted from that all the way to VCF, that’s going to be painful,” he said. “Those are the customers that are seeing the very big price increases, and those are the customers that are calling me.”

When it comes to considering alternatives to VMware, many seek alternatives, migrate to it and don’t have any application-level changes. But the question that should be asked right now is how one can modernize one’s application portfolio, according to Delory.

“Everybody gets nervous when I say this. VMware has been a pillar of the enterprise data center. There’s a lot of people who have made their careers on VMware, including me, by the way, I came up as a VMware admin,” he said. “It made my career in IT. So, people don’t want to hear this, but on a certain view, client-server does start to look like a legacy architecture.”

Modern architecture is service-centric and cloud-based, Delory added. That raises a new conversation that should be taking place.

“If I have this workload that’s running on VMware today, can I make it serverless? Can I containerize it? OK, can I push that out to the cloud and get in kind of a more modern architecture?” he said. “Do I really want to be having this conversation of, how do we move from one VM platform to another?”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Google Cloud Next 2024:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Google Cloud Next 2024. Neither Google, the primary sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE