High VMware licence bills are forcing most customers to shop for alternatives

Expect to spend staff time and budget auditing licences and modelling migration costs: licence pressure is prompting widespread vendor review, but operational complexity raises migration risk and extra work.

What actually changed

A survey published by Rimini Street and carried out by Unisphere Research reports that "90 percent" of the 300 organisations surveyed are looking at alternatives to VMware because of licensing costs. The coverage notes operational complexity as a top barrier to moving away from VMware. The report comes from a vendor that sells third‑party support for enterprise platforms, and the story says the survey’s findings line up with other recent coverage of VMware customers.

Who it affects

The immediate impact is on organisations that run VMware licences and feel those licence fees are excessive. Small internal IT teams will be the ones most likely to shoulder the assessment and migration work. Third‑party support vendors such as Rimini Street are positioned as alternative suppliers for companies that want to reduce dependence on VMware’s support or licensing model.

What it costs or what it replaces

The announcement does not state pricing for VMware licences or for third‑party support. What is clear from the report is the set of cost choices organisations must weigh:

• Keep paying VMware licences and keep existing operational processes. That preserves current support and avoids migration disruption, but the survey suggests many customers see this as increasingly expensive.
• Buy third‑party support (Rimini Street is an example named in the coverage) to extend the life of existing deployments while reducing dependence on VMware’s support contract model. The report identifies third‑party support as a market alternative, but it does not provide price or service‑level comparisons.
• Migrate away from VMware to another approach or vendor, which the survey says organisations are exploring but that operational complexity makes difficult.

Because the report omits concrete pricing, you will need vendor quotes and a migration cost model to compare options. The survey flags migration complexity as a material cost driver — meaning staff time, project risk and integration work are likely to dominate any headline licence savings.

What we don't know

• How much VMware licence costs have changed for the survey respondents.
• Specific price points or savings from third‑party support providers such as Rimini Street.
• Which alternative platforms or architectures respondents are evaluating.
• Typical migration cost, duration or success rates for teams that try to leave VMware.
• How results break down by organisation size, industry or region.

What to do next

1. Run a licence and support audit: capture current VMware spend, contract end dates and support terms so you have a baseline for vendor quotes.
2. Get three written quotes: include VMware renewal, a third‑party support option (ask Rimini Street or similar for a proposal) and at least one migration estimate that itemises labour, testing and integration costs.
3. Pilot before you pivot: if licence pressure is high, select a low‑risk workload to test third‑party support or migration to validate operational effort and cost assumptions before committing company‑wide.