More than two years after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, most enterprise customers are still actively reducing their VMware footprint, according to a new survey from CloudBolt Software. The report, based on responses from 302 IT decision-makers at North American companies with at least 1,000 employees, reveals that 86 percent of respondents are actively reducing their VMware footprint despite initial fears of mass exodus.

Broadcom's changes to VMware have been particularly disruptive, with 88 percent of survey respondents describing the acquisition as disruptive. Price increases were the top concern, cited by 89 percent of respondents, followed by uncertainty about Broadcom's plans (85 percent) and support quality concerns (78 percent). While some customers reported price hikes of up to 1,000 percent in early quotes, the survey found more modest increases: 14 percent reported costs doubling or more, while 31 percent saw increases under 25 percent.

Migration efforts are ongoing, with 36 percent of respondents having moved 1-24 percent of their workloads off VMware, and another 32 percent migrating 25-49 percent. Public cloud infrastructure as a service received 72 percent of migrated workloads, followed by Microsoft's Hyper-V/Azure stack at 43 percent. The survey also identified multi-platform complexity (52 percent) and skills gaps (33 percent) as the top migration challenges, suggesting that while the fear has cooled, the pressure to diversify remains.