More than two years after Broadcom took over VMware, the virtualisation company’s customers are still grappling with higher prices, uncertainty, and the challenges of reducing vendor lock-in.

CloudBolt Software have released a report, “The Mass Exodus That Never Was: The Squeeze Is Just Beginning” that provides insight into those struggles. CloudBolt is a hybrid cloud management platform provider that aims to identify VMware customers’ pain points so it can sell them relevant solutions. In the report, CloudBolt said it surveyed 302 IT decision-makers (director-level or higher) at North American companies with at least 1,000 employees in January. The survey is far from comprehensive, but it offers a look at the obstacles these users face.

Broadcom closed its VMware acquisition in November 2023, and last month, 88 percent of survey respondents still described the change as “disruptive.” Per the survey, the most cited drivers of disruption were price increases (named by 89 percent of respondents), followed by uncertainty about Broadcom’s plans (85 percent), support quality concerns (78 percent), Broadcom shifting VMware from perpetual licenses to subscriptions (72 percent), changes to VMware’s partner program (68 percent), and the forced bundling of products (65 percent).

When Broadcom bought VMware, some customers shared horror stories about receiving quotes that showed prices increasing by as much as 1,000 percent. CloudBolt’s survey paints a more modest picture. Fourteen percent of respondents said their VMware costs have at least doubled, while 12 percent reported increases of 50–99 percent, 33 percent reported increases of 24–49 percent, and 31 percent reported increases of less than 25 percent.

Despite survey participants suggesting smaller price hikes than originally anticipated under Broadcom, companies are still struggling with the pricing changes. Eighty-five percent are concerned that VMware will become even more expensive, according to CloudBolt’s survey.

In a budget-busting leap from SAP to Oracle, West Sussex County Council is trebling its raid on capital assets such as buildings to fund its “transformational” ERP project.

The current budget for the authority’s long-running project is £27 million, more than ten times the £2.6 million originally budgeted when it started nearly seven years ago.

Last year, it was reported that the council was using money from selling off capital assets – including a former fire station – to fund the massively expanded budget. Although allowed by central government since 2016, the approach should not be used to relieve ongoing budget pressure, experts have warned.

In documents released to a council committee last week, officials said they expected use of funds from the sell-off to triple in the current financial year compared to a year earlier.

“Following a review of the 2025/26 plan, it is now currently projected that the council will use £12 million of this flexibility on qualifying transformation expenditure. However, the exact amount will not be known until the end of the financial year,” the report to the Performance and Finance Scrutiny Committee said.

In 2024/25, the council used £4 million in capital receipts to pay for its Oracle project, which it originally imagined would go live in March 2021. Officials expect the project to spend around £10 million in the 2026/27 financial year, with £4.3 million coming from capital receipts, and £5.6 million from one-off funding allocated to an IT infrastructure reserve.

An earlier estimate suggested the council might need to apply capital receipts of up to £20 million in 2025/26, with Oracle being “one major project likely to qualify.” The previous year saw £5.5 million set aside for the project from the unusual, one-off funding mechanism. Capital receipts are typically used to fund other capital projects such as schools and infrastructure rather than IT implementations and SaaS.

The council argues that selling property to fund an IT project, which would ordinarily be paid for using ongoing revenue, is justified because long-term savings are expected through “automation and enabling more tasks to be undertaken via self-service,” according to a council report from January last year.

Local council taxpayers will hope this is the case. However, the project has already confounded expectations. A report to the committee in 2024 said that in November 2019, the authority agreed a budget of £2.6 million, but later decided it needed more suppliers to help change business processes and reset the budget to £14.07 million, including £7 million in March 2021 and £7.07 million in October 2022.

In a separate report to the council last month, the project team said the current approved budget is £27 million, based on a program of up to three years from May 2024, with finance, procurement, HR, and payroll live by April 2026, including six months of post-implementation support.

However, the £27 million figure does not appear to include spending on the project before May 2024. Systems integrator DXC began working with the council on the project under a five-year, £4 million contract in May 2020. Auditors EY later said there were “weaknesses regarding budgeting, governance and risk management.”

In July 2023, the council found there was no real prospect of a deliverable plan being agreed. It terminated the agreement with DXC on 1 September 2023 despite the company winning a lucrative contract variation. Published data detailing council spending shows that throughout its period working with the council on the project, DXC was paid around £6.6 million, more than 50 percent above the original contract price.

In a statement, a spokesperson said:

“We generate capital receipts from the sale of assets and routinely sell assets that we no longer have an operational use for. West Sussex County Council has made a financial choice to use the receipts available to help fund the implementation of Oracle.

“The total estimated cost for the programme is approximately £41million. This is comprised of the initial £14.07 million spent during the earlier phases and the current approved budget of £27.048 million for the programme’s completion.”

The Bank of England has trebled the amount it is spending on its Oracle systems integrator amid efforts to migrate business applications to the cloud.

The UK’s central bank has planned the move since 2020, and a recent procurement note revealed it has increased financial outlay with Oracle implementation partner Version 1 to £21.5 million after initially tendering the contract for £7 million.

Version 1 was hired to “support the implementation of technical and change management aspects of the Oracle Cloud implementation and business change program,” according to the official documents.

The latest increase is due to an amendment to the Bank’s Application Management Service contract, including the “need for additional works, services or supplies” that “were not included in the initial procurement,” the notice says.

Another supplier could not meet these requirements for “economic or technical reasons such as requirements of interchangeability or interoperability with existing equipment, services or installations.” Any change in supplier might also “cause significant inconvenience or substantial duplication of costs,” it adds.

The latest increase is the second time the 330-year-old institution has upped the contract value. The procurement was first advertised for £7 million in 2022, and, after a competition, it was awarded to Version 1 for £8.7 million in September 2023.

In February last year, that figure was inflated to £13.8 million, with the bulk of the increase attributed to “amended implementation methodology, from a two-phase approach, to a multiple-phase approach with Oracle Modules going live based on the Bank’s priorities.”

At the time, a spokesperson said: “The Bank is implementing Oracle Cloud to consolidate several different systems which will help the Bank fulfil its mission. We aim to achieve value for money in all our procurement.”

The Bank of England is a public body that raises money regulating institutions, printing banknotes, banking services, management fees charged to government agencies, and investments built up over 300 years. It generates more income than it spends and contributes millions of pounds to the UK Treasury.

According to training provider Fudgelearn, the Bank of England is implementing Oracle Cloud SaaS Fusion Applications, including Finance, Procurement, Projects, Expenses, EPM, and Reporting.

The contract is “intended to deliver a step change in the capabilities and value delivered by the finance, procurement and recruitment functions in the Bank, leveraging the existing Oracle Cloud tool set to drive sustainable business change.”

Last week, the bank also awarded Oracle a £13 million contract to provide technical support for Oracle SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

In June 2025, the BoE said it would increase the maximum spending of a framework deal for a raft of services, including support for its complex configuration of SAP, “in particular Business Warehouse” and interoperability between multi-cloud environments and on-prem and shared datacenters. The maximum value of the arrangement was set at £60 million when it was awarded in September 2024. It was then increased to £86.7 million in a non-competitive award.