On March 19, 2026, CISPE — a coalition of more than 50 European cloud providers, including Infomaniak — filed an antitrust complaint against Broadcom with the European Commission. The accusation: abuse of dominant position on VMware licenses, in violation of Article 102 TFEU.
The impact in Switzerland
The numbers speak for themselves:
- City of Zurich: CHF 24.8 million in VMware licenses awarded without a public tender. The city council voted CHF 225,000 to develop an exit plan.
- LUKS (Lucerne Cantonal Hospital): 100% VMware infrastructure, 5-year ELA contract.
- BIT (Federal Office of Information Technology): private cloud primarily VMware, framework contract of CHF 319 million (2025-2032).
- IBM ceased VMware license sales in Switzerland since October 2025.
- FINMA: vendor lock-in is identified as a systemic risk in the Risk Monitor 2024-2025.
Unprecedented price increases
Since the Broadcom acquisition, documented increases range from 800% to 1500%. The VCSP partner program has been reduced from 4,000 partners to 28 worldwide. The deadline: March 31, 2026.
A market in motion
- 98% of VMware customers are considering alternatives
- Only 4% have actually migrated
- Gartner predicts that 35% of VMware workloads will migrate by 2028
- VMware 8.x support ends in October 2027
What are the alternatives?
Apache CloudStack is a mature open source platform that includes a native VMware migration tool since version 4.19. Existing VMs can be imported directly, preserving disks and network configurations.
For Swiss SMEs that want to keep control of their data, an on-premises private cloud infrastructure eliminates both the risk of vendor lock-in and data sovereignty concerns.
Evaluate for yourself
CloudCan offers a 30-day trial program to test a complete private cloud infrastructure, based on Apache CloudStack and KVM.