1. Abrupt and Aggressive Licensing Cost Increases

In the months following the acquisition, Broadcom introduced sweeping changes to VMware's licensing model. Perpetual licenses were discontinued, support for smaller SKUs removed, and prices for enterprise subscriptions surged dramatically.

Enterprises that had stable, budgeted renewals are now facing sudden spikes of 3x to 5x in cost — often with very limited negotiation flexibility.

This is especially painful for mid-sized businesses and departments with fixed IT budgets. What was once a reliable, essential platform has turned into a high-cost anchor.

2. A Clear Shift in Focus Toward Large-Scale Customers

Broadcom has made no secret of its intent to streamline operations and focus on its highest-paying enterprise clients. Unfortunately, this translates to:

• Slower response times for small and mid-sized customers
• Declining customer service quality
• Reduced investment in onboarding, enablement, and education

Smaller customers — who still rely heavily on VMware for business-critical infrastructure — are left feeling abandoned and marginalized.

3. Innovation Has Taken a Back Seat

VMware once stood at the forefront of virtualization, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure innovation. But since the acquisition, product roadmaps have stalled, engineering focus has shifted, and customers report:

• Little to no new feature development
• Patchwork upgrades and lack of platform modernization
• Uncertainty around long-term viability of certain VMware products

Broadcom’s acquisition playbook is clear: optimize for profitability, not innovation.

4. Lock-In Is the New Lockdown

Even for organizations that want to move away from VMware, it's not that simple.

Years of investment in VMware-centric architectures — vSphere, NSX, vSAN, etc. — mean that replacing the stack feels prohibitively expensive, both in cost and effort. The idea of re-platforming evokes fear of:

• Disruption to mission-critical workloads
• Data loss or degradation
• Re-training teams and rewriting automation scripts

The irony? Staying locked-in is proving to be equally — if not more — expensive and risky in the long run.

5. It’s Not Just VMware. The Pattern is Repeating.

This situation is not unique. Veritas InfoScale, once a dominant high-availability and storage stack, has now been spun off as Arctera — with many of the same symptoms: cost uncertainty, unclear product direction, and thinning support ecosystems.

The broader lesson?Legacy vendors are increasingly becoming volatile, and dependence on their roadmaps is a gamble modern enterprises can no longer afford.

1. Licensing & Subscription Shock – Expect abrupt 3x to 5x increases in licensing and subscription costs. Larger enterprises may get some attention, but mid-size and smaller customers will face the brunt of these hikes.
2. Selective Customer Focus – CSG’s strategy will likely prioritize only the top-paying customers. Everyone else risks being sidelined with limited support and fewer resources.
3. Innovation Stagnation – Like many legacy platforms under new ownership, innovation will take a backseat. With the focus shifting to monetization, expect modernization and innovation to slow down dramatically, leaving customers stuck with dated technology.
4. No Cloud-Native Support – Today’s workloads demand Kubernetes integration, hybrid cloud flexibility, and observability stacks. InfoScale remains stuck in the past.
5. No AI/ML Readiness – As AI becomes central to enterprise strategy, InfoScale offers no path to support these workloads — leaving customers unprepared for the future.
6. Vendor Lock-In Challenges – The cost and complexity of replacement are massive — both in terms of money and time. And that’s exactly why incumbents tighten their grip, banking on customers’ fear of migration.

1. From Open to Closed

InfoScale’s once “open” DNA is fading. What was once an infrastructure-agnostic solution is now tied to CSG’s broader strategy. Instead of being an open, flexible layer, InfoScale risks being locked tightly into CSG’s stack, including Citrix. Customers could quickly find themselves boxed in — with fewer options, higher costs, and little flexibility to choose best-of-breed solutions.

2. Leadership Legacy of Broadcom

CSG’s CEO, Tom Krause, previously led Broadcom’s software business, where the playbook was clear: acquire, consolidate, raise prices, and focus on large accounts while sidelining smaller customers. With Krause now at the helm of CSG, InfoScale customers should expect a similar outcome — steep cost escalations, reduced focus on innovation, and tighter vendor lock-in.

InfoScale customers should prepare for exponential cost increases. Subscription bundles could replace modular offerings. And mid-market customers could be forced into 3x–5x higher costs just to maintain what they already have.

3. Stalled Innovation

Key technology leaders have already left InfoScale. Without strong technical leadership and with CSG’s focus likely on monetization, innovation is grinding to a halt. The roadmap may look uncertain, and customers can’t expect new features that address cloud-native, AI, or hybrid workloads

4. Dual Lock-In

Now that both Citrix and InfoScale sit under the CSG umbrella, customers face a dangerous dual lock-in scenario - enterprises risk being locked into two systems simultaneously — compounding complexity and cost.

5. Falling Behind Modern Workloads

In a world rapidly moving to containers, Kubernetes, observability platforms, and AI/ML-driven architectures, InfoScale remains stuck in the past. No meaningful cloud-native support. No AI workload readiness. For any enterprise, staying locked in means falling behind competitors who are already modernizing.

The message is clear: staying with InfoScale now means higher costs, fewer choices, and limited innovation. The “open” promise that once set it apart is gone.

1. VCS Is Old, Legacy, and Designed for a Different Era

VCS was engineered for a pre-cloud, pre-container era where static infrastructure was the norm. Its architecture still reflects that world:

• Agents and configurations are tightly coupled
• Scaling and automation are manual-heavy
• The model requires specialized expertise
• Integration with modern cloud-native tools is limited, or even non-existant

Meanwhile, HA approaches have evolved dramatically. Kubernetes, lightweight clustering frameworks, open-source HA stacks, and distributed architectures now offerfaster failover, better automation, and lower cost— without the legacy baggage.

Simply put:VCS no longer matches the operational model of modern applications.

2. The Cost of Managing VCS Keeps Going Up

Running VCS isn’t just about licenses. It’s about:

• Highly specialized administrators
• Complex configuration workflows
• Manual failover testing
• Long upgrade cycles
• Dependency on legacy support models

This translates to high operational cost — often multiple times more than modern HA architectures that are simpler, automated, and cloud-ready.

The irony is that organizations often keep VCS because “migration is expensive,” butthe cost of staying has quietly become even higher.

3. Under CSG, Expect Licensing Costs to Rise — Dramatically

With InfoScale now under Cloud Software Group, the industry expectation is clear:3x to 5x price increases in the coming licensing cycles.

Why? Because CSG follows a business model similar to Broadcom’s — focus on top-tier customers, aggressively monetize legacy software, and streamline portfolios with minimal innovation investment.

For most enterprises, this means:

• Higher renewal costs
• Bundled pricing with lock-in
• Reduced flexibility
• Less focus on smaller customers

The numbers are already showing up in early renewal cycles worldwide.

4. Innovation Has Stalled — While The Competition Races Ahead

In the last decade, VCS hasn’t kept pace with:

• Cloud-native HA
• Container-aware clustering
• API-driven orchestration
• Distributed application architectures
• AI-driven observability and failover
• Real-time DR automation

Competing solutions — open-source and commercial — are innovating rapidly in automation, AI-based failure prediction, multi-cloud resilience, and lightweight clustering.

The exit of key InfoScale technology leaders recently only strengthens the view that innovation inside CSG will stagnate even further.

Final Thoughts: Staying with VCS Is Now a Strategic Risk

With rising cost, stalled innovation, and increasing lock-in, continuing with VCS is no longer the safe choice — it’s the risky one.

At LegacyUnplugged, we help enterprises:

• Assess whether VCS still fits your future
• Identify modern, open, cloud-native HA alternatives
• Plan a risk-free, low-downtime migration
• Distributed application architectures
• Reduce TCO while increasing reliability and agility

Let’s talk — a 15-minute free call could save years of cost and complexity.