For many enterprises, VMware has been part of the infrastructure landscape for so long that it’s almost become invisible. It’s not simply software that enterprises can swap out when circumstances change. For many businesses, it is part of the operational foundation of the business.
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in 2023 marked the beginning of a broad transformation. Since then, changes to product packaging, licensing, and the partner ecosystem have given enterprise IT teams new reasons to take a closer look at where VMware fits in their long-term infrastructure strategy.
VCF 9 adds another dimension to the decision. VMware is no longer just a conversation about where virtual machines run. The platform increasingly brings infrastructure, application modernization, and platform capabilities closer together, giving enterprises more opportunity to get value from their VMware investment, not simply run virtual machines.
As a VMware Cloud Service Provider partner, RapidScale has a close view of that evolution and the decisions it’s creating for customers. For some organizations, the right move may be to lean further into VMware and take advantage of capabilities they aren’t using today. For others, the opportunity may be to determine where VMware fits into a broader hybrid or multi-cloud strategy.
That leaves enterprises with a deceptively difficult question: How do you determine the right path for each workload?
A spreadsheet comparing license prices won’t answer it.
The evolution of VMware is creating an opportunity for a bigger, and arguably healthier, conversation: What should an enterprise infrastructure strategy look like for the next era of computing?
That’s the question that Jamie Konzelman, field chief revenue officer at RapidScale, answered in an episode of AppDevANGLE on how VMware’s evolution is changing the TCO equation.
Much of the VMware conversation has focused on cost. Understandably so.
In the episode, host Paul Nashawaty shared research that 32% of organizations rank total cost of ownership (TCO) as the factor carrying the most weight in their final technology selections.
But licensing is only one dimension of cost.
Enterprises have spent years building around VMware. It’s not just the infrastructure. It’s the applications connected to it, the security and recovery processes supporting it, the tools integrated with it, and the people who know how to keep it all running.
That’s a lot to account for when you’re considering a change.
And the challenge goes beyond VMware. Nashawaty noted that 55% of organizations say maintaining legacy debt consumes 26%–50% of their application development budgets. Another 47% pointed to complex business or regulatory logic embedded in their code as a reason they’ve kept legacy systems in place rather than modernizing them.
Moving to something new might solve one problem. But if it requires major application work, new skills, new operating processes, or additional security and compliance controls, it can introduce costs and complexity somewhere else. Change has a cost, too.
That’s why licensing is only part of the conversation. You also have to consider the value of what’s already in place and the true cost of changing it.
When infrastructure costs come under scrutiny, it’s natural to start comparing your current VMware environment with other private cloud, public cloud, or open-source options. But that comparison only tells part of the story.
A meaningful TCO analysis needs to account for:
When it comes to downtime and disruption, costs can add up quickly. It’s a lesson many organizations already learned during the first major rush toward public cloud. The promise of “better, faster, cheaper” sometimes clashed with rapidly growing OpEx, difficult cost governance, and workloads that simply weren’t economical.
The answer wasn’t that public cloud was bad. It was that workload placement matters. The same principle applies to VMware.
There’s another reason to resist the urge to make infrastructure decisions based solely on licensing: moving a workload isn’t the same as modernizing it.
As Konzelman explained, a VMware migration involves much more than changing infrastructure. It requires looking at the applications, data, dependencies, security requirements, and skills that will need to move with it.
Suppose an organization moves an aging application from VMware to a different platform. The hosting environment changed, but its architectural complexity, technical debt, dependencies, security requirements, and outdated code may still be there.
You’ve moved the problem. You haven’t necessarily solved it.
The timelines involved also deserve attention. Nashawaty’s research found that 40% of respondents said modernizing one high-priority legacy application takes 13–24 months.
Now multiply that challenge across hundreds or thousands of workloads. That’s why discovery should happen at the workload and application level.
For each workload, enterprises should understand seven key considerations:
Only after answering these questions does “Where should this run?” become a useful question.
And migration doesn’t need to be a big-bang event. Lower-risk workloads can move first, allowing teams to validate performance, data integrity, security, recovery, and operating procedures before progressing to more critical applications.
There’s another wrinkle in the VMware debate.
The platform itself is changing.
VCF 9 expands what companies can get from their VMware environment, bringing infrastructure management and application modernization closer together in one platform.
That matters because many organizations have historically treated infrastructure and application modernization as separate initiatives. But increasingly, they aren’t.
For organizations committed to VMware, the question becomes less about whether every capability in the bundle is being used today and more about whether those capabilities can eliminate redundant tooling, simplify operations, improve automation, or accelerate application modernization.
An overlooked part of TCO is the value organizations fail to extract from technology they already own.
Before replacing a platform, it’s worth understanding whether better use of the existing investment can materially change the economics.
And then there’s AI. Nearly every organization is experimenting with it, but actually moving from proof-of-concept to production creates an entirely different set of questions around infrastructure.
Nashawaty’s research shows that almost 50% of organizations expect 26%–50% of their organization’s code to be assisted or generated by AI within the next 12 months.
The infrastructure implications go well beyond buying GPUs. AI raises bigger-picture questions about:
As Konzelman put it, for infrastructure to be AI-ready, it needs to be able to run AI securely, economically, and close to the data it uses.
In some cases, public cloud will be the right answer. In others, predictable AI workloads and large data sets may create a compelling case for private infrastructure. Many enterprises will ultimately need both.
The right cloud strategy starts with the workload, not the platform.
VMware’s changing economics may provide the compelling event that forces your organization to revisit infrastructure strategy. But the bigger opportunity is to step back and look at the environment as a whole: what’s working, where you’re getting value, and what needs to change to support the business over the next several years.
Start with six questions:
Answering those questions isn’t always straightforward, especially when you’re balancing cost with security, compliance, application dependencies, limited IT resources, and the pressure to keep the business running throughout any change.
That’s where RapidScale can help. As a VMware partner with expertise across private, public, and hybrid cloud, RapidScale can help you take a closer look at your current environment, understand the options, and build a path forward around your workloads and business priorities.
The goal isn’t change for the sake of change. It’s making sure the investments you make today can support where the business is headed next.
Talk with a RapidScale cloud expert about your environment, workloads, and business priorities, and explore the options that make the most sense for what comes next. Talk to a cloud expert now.