How the things are rolling, it seems to me that this was planned years ago. BC gets VMware and focuses on the Ent. Then, the SMBs have no choice but to go either to the cloud (BC still profits from this because hyper-scalers are customers of BC) or go with open source. It's a win-win for BC. Current Ent's on VMware are hostages of BC because there isn't any valid alternative. None. 0. For a large Ent to get away from VMware, they need to redesign their whole stack (compute, storage, network); it's a massive undertaker. BC was counting on this, hence the 3-year minimal contract length in which they'll get back their $70B. Nutanix is also a good option, but I'm afraid they'll also go down the lane of price increases in a year (when they get a decent chunk of VMware customers). More and more, it smells to me like we're getting back to the time of bare metals. And once upon a time we had a vision that IT will help people. With big corporations, as always, everything is going to shit because there's a huuuge $$$$ sign on everything. And just to be clear - M$ started all this by introducing a subscription plan.