Kimley-Horn is one of many enterprises that ditched their long-standing work with VMware following that vendor’s acquisition by Broadcom, a move that the civil engineering said was due to the licensing and pricing changes Broadcom instituted for VMware’s Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) service.

Cayla Collins, technical analyst at Kimley-Horn, explained that the firm had been using VMware’s Horizon VDI service to support its workforce since 2012. This included an on-premises setting as well as for remote workers.

However, the firm was notified that its contract was about to expire and was offered new terms that were priced above what it had been paying. Collins explained that they asked their VMware representative if they could be grandfathered into their price structure, “because we had been working with VMware for so long and we did have a great relationship with them and our sales rep, but there just really wasn’t any way around it.”

“They did offer a small extension, but … it essentially boiled down to it was we either were going to eventually have to pay the new licensing prices or find a different solution,” Collins said.

Collins said that the firm worked through a couple of proof-of-concepts with other vendors, which tested performance requirements of those vendors in Kimley-Horn’s computer-aided design (CAD) environment. This included “mouse lag and the bogginess of a heavy mouse within the CAD application itself,” Collins added.

Those tests led Kimley-Horn to eventually decide on Nerdio, a decision that was based on performance and pricing, with the actual move itself eased by Nerdio relying on the same Azure cloud infrastructure Kimley-Horn was using for its VMware-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

“The actual migration piece of moving … getting the desktop images and profiles and everything set up in Nerdio I think only took a couple of days,” Collins said.

While performance was a large part of the decision making, Collins did note that costs were a significant factor. This included more flexibility on terms and insight into different cost parameters, which has already shown through over the first couple of months of use.

“We have definitely seen cost savings when it comes to the virtual machines themselves, the storage and the disk sizes as well, and even the profiles too,” Collins said. “We've seen a substantial cost savings with that and with the auto-scale settings that we set and all the pools. And then even changing whenever a virtual machine might be powered off, you can change from premium disk to standard-size disk, and that saves money too.”

VMware’s Horizon VDI platform was ranked by Gartner as one of the “leaders” of its “Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service” alongside rivals Microsoft and Citrix. Broadcom did end up selling VMware’s Horizon business, which was part of VMware’s broader End-User Computing Division, to KKR for $4 billion.

Kimley-Horn is still using Horizon on-premises, “because we do still have some licenses that are active,” Collins added.

Snapshot of Broadcom’s VMware exodus

Kimley-Horn’s move is a microcosm of a larger exodus playing out in the space. Analysts and Broadcom rivals have spent the past year touting forecasts and real-world examples of enterprises dropping VMware services due to license and pricing changes.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami recently claimed the vendor added “roughly about 700 customers in this quarter,” and that “the vast majority of them are probably VMware customers.” The executive added that these are customers are “largely moving away from those legacy VMware stacks.”

Equity research firm William Blair in a recent Nutanix report mentioned that market research firms were predicting up to 30% of VMware’s installed base of more than 400,000 customers “will eventually switch away from VMware.”

That sentiment was echoed by Forrester Research Principal Analyst Naveen Chhabra who told SDxCentral up to 20% of the world’s largest enterprises “will start to exit – read these words very carefully – will start to exit the VMware stack.”

“They will not do a full replacement overnight, but in parts, they will start to move away,” Chhabra said. “I clearly see that happening right now and I don’t need to go another five months to claim that that prediction was true. It is happening.”

Many have noted that Broadcom has been more flexible on pricing with some of its larger customers, at least to an extent.

“What VMware will not be flexible on is, ‘hey, let me create some new bundles just because you want it.’ That is not going to happen,” Chhabra said. “You want to meet their price targets, that can happen by additional discounts. That’s it. No more changing of the packaging, no more changing of the product composition those packages.”

Broadcom, for its part, appears to be good with its management of VMware. It reported robust growth from its VMware-infused software infrastructure business during its most recent earnings call, with CEO Hock Tan stating the vendor booked 21 million total CPU cores during the latest quarter compared to 19 million cores posted in the previous quarter. More significantly, Tan said that 70% of those new booked cores were on its flagship VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform, “virtualizing the entire data center.”

Tan also noted that Broadcom had signed up 4,500 of its largest 10,000 customers to its VCF platform, and that the platform generated $2.7 billion in annualized booking value (ABV) during the latest quarter. Those numbers are significant improvements from the 3,000 resigned customers and $1.9 billion in ABV Tan noted during the vendor’s Q2 results.

Big moves take planning

Kimley-Horn’s move did upend what had been more than a decade of work with VMware, something Collins said the firm was able to do thanks to proper planning. This included taking a deep look into what they really needed in a service and using that to guide its decision.

“One of the biggest things that really aided us in this process was sitting down … and really making note of everything that we require, is mandatory of a VDI solution. What's more, we would like to have this, but it's not necessary, and then the remaining don't need this … That really streamlined our process,” Collins said.

Kimley-Horn also took time to see what pieces it already had in place that might be impacted by the move and accounting for how to transfer those systems over to the new platform.

“Anything that's networking related, infrastructure related, security, firewall, all that stuff, we really had to create a lot of documentation going into this to really, truly understand if this is going to play the role that we needed it to play already in our infrastructure for our company or is this going to but heads with something that we already have in place that we can't budge on,” Collins said, concluding that it’s important to figure “out the things that you must have, and then also understanding your environment before proceeding with proof of concept and going live.”