Two years ago, Europe had more than a thousand cloud providers authorized to sell VMware-based services. Today, according to CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe), the European cloud providers’ association, fewer than twenty remain. That is not a soft market correction. It is a channel collapse that happened in plain sight after Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware, and it is a warning for every company whose platform roadmap still depends on someone else’s licensing mood.
The latest procedural win for CISPE at the EU General Court — allowing the association to keep confidential the identities of members backing its challenge to the European Commission’s unconditional clearance of the deal — is not a ruling on the merits. It does, however, keep the case alive. And the case matters more now than when it was filed, because the foreclosure CISPE warned about has already arrived for large parts of the European VMware channel.
What changed after the acquisition
Broadcom completed the VMware purchase in November 2023. Within a month, partners were told the old channel program was ending and that Broadcom would keep only a select group of Cloud Service Providers with the largest turnover. Licensing shifted toward bundles. Hundreds of hosting providers lost the right to resell. Customers of those providers did not get a strategy memo. They got renewals, migrations, and bills that no longer matched the plan they had built their infrastructure around.
Public examples of sticker shock have been widely reported. AT&T said Broadcom proposed a 1,050 percent price increase. In a recent survey of VMware customers, nine out of ten respondents said they were considering alternatives. CISPE Secretary General Francisco Mingorance has been blunt: in the three years since the Commission waved the deal through without conditions aimed at cloud providers, Broadcom has dismantled the European VMware channel. Providers that were cut off face a hard deadline — sell their infrastructure or their customers to a competitor chosen by Broadcom, or close — by 31 March 2027.
Why this is bigger than one vendor
It is easy to treat this as a VMware story. It is not. It is a control-of-the-stack story. When your virtualization layer, your private cloud tooling, or your managed platform sits on a license you do not control, your costs and your roadmap are only as stable as the next decision from the company that owns that license. Overnight renewals, forced migrations, and surprise bills are not edge cases. They are what happens when commercial power concentrates and the counterparty list shrinks from a thousand partners to a handful.
European cloud providers and their customers are living that concentration in real time. CISPE’s challenge and its separate competition complaint are attempts to claw back room for commercially fair terms. Whatever the courts decide, operators who waited for a ruling before building a backup plan will have waited too long. The channel that used to absorb shock is already gone for most of the market.
There is also a quieter operational cost that rarely shows up in the headlines. Teams spend months documenting runbooks, capacity plans, and disaster recovery against a platform they assumed would still be available on familiar commercial terms. When the reseller disappears, that work does not transfer cleanly. Migrations are rushed. Support contacts change. Compliance paperwork has to be rewritten. The licensing event becomes an engineering project you did not staff.
Own the hardware. Own the outcomes.
At InnoScale we have a simple answer to licensing dependency: we own our hardware. We run our own datacenters in the United States and in Europe. There is no middleman deciding what your infrastructure costs next year based on a partner program redesign. When something breaks, you reach real engineers, any hour — not a ticket queue designed to protect a license margin. We have been doing this for twenty-five years.
That model does not make every licensing risk disappear. No honest host will claim that. What it does is put the stack you depend on under operators who answer to you, on metal that is not rented from a hyperscaler or gated by a channel that can vanish after an acquisition. If you are leaving VMware, evaluating alternatives, or simply want a backup plan that is not another reseller of the same fragile channel, that is the conversation worth having.
Have a backup plan
The Register’s coverage of the CISPE confidentiality ruling is a useful reminder that the legal fight continues. The operational reality for most European providers and their customers is already settled: fewer than twenty authorized VMware cloud providers remain where there used to be more than a thousand. That is the number that should sit on every infrastructure roadmap review this quarter.
Independent cloud is not a slogan. It is the decision to control the stack your business runs on. Whether you need a parallel environment while you plan a migration, dual-region presence across the US and EU, or a host that will still be there when the next channel letter arrives, start with a clear inventory of what you cannot afford to lose — and who actually owns it.
If you want to talk about moving workloads or designing for resilience on hardware we own, contact the InnoScale team. We will keep the conversation practical — and we will not make your roadmap depend on someone else’s licensing mood.
