Broadcom has a new subscription tier for VMware virtualization software that may appease some disgruntled VMware customers, especially small to medium-sized businesses. The new VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus subscription tier creates a more digestible bundle that’s more appropriate for smaller customers. But it may be too late to convince some SMBs not to abandon VMware.
Soon after Broadcom bought VMware, it stopped the sale of VMware perpetual licenses and started requiring subscriptions. Broadcom also bundled VMware’s products into a smaller number of SKUs, resulting in higher costs and frustration for customers that felt like they were being forced to pay for products that they didn’t want. All that, combined with Broadcom ditching some smaller VMware channel partners (and reportedly taking the biggest clients direct), have raised doubts that Broadcom’s VMware would be a good fit for smaller customers.
“The challenge with much of the VMware by Broadcom changes to date and before the announcement [of the vSphere Enterprise Plus subscription tier] is that it also forced many organizations to a much higher offering and much more components to a stack that they were previously uninterested in deploying,” Rick Vanover, Veeam’s product strategy VP, told Ars.
On October 31, Broadcom announced the vSphere Enterprise Plus subscription tier. From smallest to largest, the available tiers are vSphere Standard, vSphere Enterprise Plus, vSphere Foundation, and the flagship VMware Cloud Foundation. The introduction of vSphere Enterprise Plus means that customers who only want vSphere virtualization can now pick from two bundles instead of one.
“[T]o round out the portfolio, for customers who are focused on compute virtualization, we will now have two options, VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus and VMware vSphere Standard,” Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of product marketing in the VMware Cloud Foundation division of Broadcom, explained in a blog post.
