Broadcom has killed off a VMware software-as-a-service product, despite also moving the virtualization giant’s other wares to subscription-only licenses – the sort of arrangement at which SaaS excels.

The axed product is Aria SaaS, a cloudy version of VMware’s Aria management tools (which were previously sold under the “vRealize” brand).

VMware by Broadcom last week decided to stop selling the Saas-y suite because it’s bundled Aria into its vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation offerings. Both can be run on-prem or in SaaS mode in several clouds.

Shuttering the SaaS service is consistent with Broadcom’s decision to sell only bundles of VMware products, plus add-ons for extra capabilities. But it also unwinds VMware’s past strategy of offering some of its tools as SaaS to relieve users of the need to manage infrastructure. Indeed, VMware touted its SaaS offerings as in many ways superior to its packaged products, partly because delivering them as SaaS meant it could innovate more quickly.

Broadcom reckons killing off Aria SaaS will have the upside of prompting its partners to offer Aria as-a-service by deploying its Cloud Foundation suite.

Aria SaaS was one of 59 products that VMware stopped selling as standalone offerings last week. Not all were bundled into VMware by Broadcom’s new suites. That absence doesn’t necessarily denote death: some of the discontinued products were themselves bundles.

VMware by Broadcom delivered news of the mass demise in a knowledgebase article.

Interestingly, on Monday the business unit replaced the article with a blog post that assured users of the axed products that there is “no immediate action required at this time.”

“VMware will continue to offer active support through the duration of your support contract. In the future, at the time of renewal, you can work with your VMware representative or VMware partner to align your go forward requirements to VMware’s updated portfolio of offerings.”

VMware by Broadcom’s catchphrase to justify its recent changes is “This portfolio simplification will allow customers to extract more value from their VMware investment and enable VMware to accelerate delivery of new innovations and ease both deployment and management for customers.”

VMware customers are yet to see evidence of either outcome. Indeed, The Register has read many accounts of users who feel the cost of their VMware products has effectively increased because of their only being offered in bundles that include more products than they want to use. Just how that equates to “more value” is hard to understand – especially for users who want to persist with Aria SaaS, but face a migration project to move from one source of the service to another.