Broadcom axes VMware education licensing options for schools

School's out

The VMware IT Academy and Academic Software Licensing programs formally entered end-of-life on Aug. 15, meaning customers can purchase or cash in one more year of services and licenses before Aug. 31.

"We understand that the IT Academy has been a reliable resource for many years, and we are disappointed to be delivering this message," the VMware IT Academy team said in an email to customers on Aug. 8.

This came at an inopportune time as many educators lack access at this time of year to email accounts the message was sent to, Kirsch said.

Schools opting to stay and pay with Broadcom for licenses will face sticker shock, he added. The program enabled Kirsch to run VMware for student lab access time through a flat fee, usually under $300, but he expects the professional licensing cost to run upward of $30,000 annually.

Broadcom updated its VMware Certification Program in May, eliminating the need to complete a training course or prerequisite certifications before testing for a specific certification. The company said many of its exams would charge a flat fee of $250.

"Broadcom confirms that the existing VMware IT Academy program, which was administered by third parties, has been shut down," a Broadcom spokesperson wrote in an email statement to TechTarget Editorial. "The offerings that were available under this program were part of an end-of-sale announcement in December 2023."

Kirsch said he's working on adjusting the virtualization curriculum to use a combination of Proxmox as an alternative open source virtualization platform for course material as well as Microsoft Hyper-V, a Windows virtualization platform, instead of VMware.

Future impact

Other virtualization platforms are decent training for data center careers, but aren't equivalent to VMware's ubiquitous enterprise software, Kirsch said.

"My students will have experience with Proxmox, but that doesn't help them," he said. "It's exposure [to virtualization concepts], but if you're going into a VMware shop, you don't have that experience, so it hurts the student population."

Brian Kirsch

Broadcom's changes to the VMware licensing model from a la carte purchases or packages to all-inclusive subscription services has already created significant upheaval among IT professionals, Kirsch said.

"[They're] going to make money today, but within two to three years, you're going to start to drop," he said. "I've seen a lot of former students already talk about how they moved away from VMware because of the licensing costs. This is a mistake on top of a mistake."

Cutting off access to future customers over perceived costs or unnecessary expenses for fiscal leanness is a signature Broadcom tactic, said Andrew Lerner, an analyst at Gartner. The move might make immediate financial sense, but creates future distrust among customers over how long a vendor will support a product or service.

"These types of commercial practices are creating negative sentiment, and there is a desire to investigate alternative approaches and vendors as a result," Lerner wrote in an email statement.

Customer sentiment might not be much of a concern for VMware for much longer, as the company cuts ties to smaller partners and customers, said Naveen Chhabra, an analyst at Forrester Research. A handful of customers provide most of VMware's revenue, which Broadcom would rather focus on maintaining instead of paying for expenses superfluous to the core business.

"[VMware is] not expecting to grow its user base significantly," he said. "That means [they] don't have a new generation of workforce ready for [their] tech, [but] that's not [their] focus."

Broadcom has a history of acquisitions followed by significant cuts, Chhabra said. But those cuts have always resulted in profits for shareholders and Broadcom executives like President and CEO Hock Tan, even if it leads to a loss in programs or head count.

"Hock Tan is looking at VMware completely from [the perspective of] financial return on investment," Chhabra said. "He's making the right bets."

But major technology vendors shouldn't discount nurturing budding users while in pursuit of profit, Kirsch said.

For example, Cisco has become an IT standard due to its heavy presence in education through discounted products and services, he said. Those formative experiences help to inspire future loyalty.

"If I was an IT vendor, I'd be lining up to get a course into a college," Kirsch said.

Tim McCarthy is a news writer for TechTarget Editorial covering cloud and data storage.