The acquisition closed in November 2022 and the IT industry has been having a sustained anxiety episode ever since. My inbox has been full of some version of the same question for three months. “Brian, what does Broadcom buying VMware mean for my career?” and “Brian, should I be worried about my VMware skills becoming worthless?”
I want to give you a calm, clear-headed answer because I think the volume of noise around this acquisition is making it harder for people to think straight about it.
Broadcom is not a company that acquires technology businesses and runs them into the ground out of spite. They have a well-established pattern of acquiring enterprise software companies, rationalizing the product portfolio to focus on the most profitable and strategically important pieces, and extracting value through a combination of pricing power and operational efficiency. They did this with CA Technologies. They did it with Symantec’s enterprise business. The VMware acquisition is a larger bet but it follows recognizable logic.
What that pattern means in practice for VMware is that the enterprise-critical products, vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and the core virtualization platform, are not going away. They are the products that generate the revenue that justified a sixty-one billion dollar acquisition. What is going to change is the pricing model, the support structure, the partner ecosystem economics, and possibly the pace of innovation in some areas. Those changes are real and they are significant for organizations trying to plan their infrastructure spend. They are not, however, a reason to conclude that VMware skills have become worthless.
The more relevant question for IT professionals is whether the customer-side reality of the post-acquisition VMware is going to reduce enterprise adoption over time. That is a genuinely open question. Some organizations are going to accelerate migrations to alternative platforms in response to the pricing changes. Others are going to accept the new licensing economics because the switching costs are high and the alternatives involve real operational risk. The honest projection is that both things will happen and the VMware installed base will gradually shrink while remaining enormous for at least the next five to seven years.
What that means for certification is that VMware skills remain valuable and marketable for a long time, but the urgency of keeping those skills current on the leading edge has changed. For people who are early in their infrastructure careers and deciding what to prioritize, a VMware certification paired with cloud skills is a stronger combination than either alone. The current certification details are available at Broadcom’s VMware certification page.
The sky is not falling. The landscape is changing. Those are not the same thing and they require different responses. Stay informed, understand the direction of your specific environment and employer, and make deliberate decisions about where to invest your professional development effort rather than reacting to the noise.
Brian Rhoades is a Senior VMware Instructor and IT veteran with more than 15 years of hands-on experience in virtualization, systems engineering, and cloud infrastructure. He has trained thousands of IT professionals to confidently work with VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, and has authored multiple books and study guides for outlets across the industry. Brian has a habit of being somewhere new every few weeks, which if you've ever tried to pin down a good VMware instructor, explains a lot.