A growing number of VMware customers are doing something that looks contradictory on paper: renewing their VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) subscriptions in full, then declining to take the very upgrade those subscriptions exist to fund. They are paying for VCF 9, but they are not installing it.
It’s a pattern I’ve watched grow steadily since the Broadcom acquisition, and it isn’t a handful of stragglers waiting out a compatibility issue. It’s a consistent category of customer behaviour in its own right, sitting somewhere between full migration and full commitment to VCF 9.
You might expect the explanation to be technical: a workload that isn’t ready, a compatibility issue, a migration too complex to schedule on Broadcom’s timetable. There’s some truth in that. The obstacles most frequently cited by customers are migration complexity, higher-than-expected alternative costs, and technical barriers. But the concern that ranks above all of those is price: 85% remain worried about…
