Yes, VMware has become quite the hot topic in the public sphere.
Across hearings, the parliamentary inquiry into digital dependencies offered a clear snapshot of the situation.
For the CNRS, an exit “unthinkable in the medium term”
On April 1, 2026, IT directors from research organizations testified. Among them was Marie-Pierre Fontanel, who holds this post at CNRS. “We are entirely on VMware,” she admitted. An exit is “unthinkable in the medium term: it would cost us extremely dearly.” She drew a parallel with her SAP footprint: “exiting it after 20 years, with bespoke developments, is extremely complicated.”
“Unlike our colleagues, we did not suffer an increase during the Broadcom transition,” tempers Fontanel: “I think we were already paying the maximum”.
INRAE targets the Dinum tools “when possible”
INRAE has chosen an open-source solution to replace VMware. Its CIO Jean-Michel Vansteene does not specify which one, but states that a migration is being considered for this year. The institute did not pin down the precise number of man-days needed, but is counting heavily on the automation it has developed.
“We are pursuing a determined, gradual exit… and moving toward Dinum’s tools whenever feasible,” explains Louis-Augustin Julien, deputy director-general for resources at INRAE. He adds that abandoning Zoom is planned in favor of the state’s videoconferencing tool. And that the institute has left Oracle’s ERP to adopt a shared solution within higher education and research, based on SAP.
At Inserm, a migration estimated at 1,000 man-days
Inserm also uses VMware. Alternatives are limited, notes Damien Rousset, deputy director-general for administration. On one hand, free software presents maintenance difficulties due to the human resources it requires. On the other hand, sovereign tools developed by the state “will not be able to cover everything.”
“Microsoft isn’t the biggest expense for us, because we benefit from so-called ‘education’ licenses,” adds Damien Rousset. “It’s on the order of €350,000 per year.” The suppliers costing Inserm the most are Broadcom (more than €1 million per year for VMware technologies), as well as Palo Alto and Splunk, “which must also exceed €1 million each.”
“When they announced a 50% or 60% cost increase overnight, we started asking whether to switch,” continues Damien Rousset. The IT department had estimated the migration-support cost at 1,000 man-days. Inserm then began diversifying by introducing an open-source virtualization solution. “We were not able to absorb a complete migration overnight and therefore had to endure this cost increase,” the official acknowledges, though.
At the Ministry of National Education, €2.5 million per year… but a “considerable saving in resources”
Within the Ministry of National Education, the expenditures linked to VMware technologies total around €2.5 million per year. Their use across the entire tech stack is both a strength and a weakness, explains Audran Le Baron, head of digital education. “This situation has protected us from the editor’s pricing policy shift… since the vendor had grouped its entire offer, clients who used only part of it had to buy the whole package … while our bill remained stable.” This choice has also enabled running an internal cloud with substantial resource savings. The staffing involved are, in this case, not comparable to what would be needed to run a cloud on open-source technologies, as done by the DGFiP or the Ministry of the Interior.
The VMware exit plan appears more difficult to implement than the one for Oracle. The challenge isn’t so much with databases (the ministry remains attached to IBM’s Db2, which it plans to shed in the medium term) but with identity and messaging services in the academies (being replaced) and WebLogic “for a large part of our web applications.”
VMware, a “controlled dependency” for the Ministry of Economy and Finance
Yves Billon, head of the digital service at the General Secretariat of the Ministries of Economy and Finance, characterizes VMware as a “controlled dependency.” The internal cloud, Nubo, indeed relies on OpenStack. Broadcom’s decisions have proven “not too painful.” “We are exploring alternative solutions […] such as Proxmox, which our teams are testing in depth,” says Yves Billon. These solutions “nevertheless hold a few surprises,” he cautions: don’t assume that switches are always easy.
The buyer federations, to “pull on a lever”
Thomas Jan is the deputy general director in charge of innovation and digital strategy for UniHa, the Union of Hospital Purchasers. “In the healthcare sector, we’ve learned of a proposal to a university hospital center whose constant needs saw its price rise […] by 800%,” he notes. “The value of having a federation of members in our structure is that we can act quickly and collectively with leverage over the actor involved, he adds. Nevertheless, let’s not delude ourselves: we’re a small link in the global chain. The VMware acquisition, unfortunately for us, has somewhat shifted the landscape by showing that we must do things differently.”
Stéphanie Schaer echoes Jan’s remarks. “The larger the ministry’s weight, the greater its negotiating power,” she notes. The inter-ministerial digital directorate’s work to identify alternative solutions is ongoing. “Sometimes, a good negotiation buys us time to consider the exit,” she adds. This is the direction this project is currently taking.
From VMware to open source, Bpifrance has “unlocked” itself
“Our IT department saw the phenomenon coming,” recalls Arnaud Cadoux, deputy CEO of Bpifrance. “Although the initial reaction was negative, we collectively concluded that the time had come to act. The investment required to exit [VMware] in favor of open source proved profitable, because this move made us far more compatible with a number of European cloud providers.”
Michel Paulin, president of the strategic sector committee for the “trusted digital solutions” of the National Council for Industry, agrees: “There are, in Europe and France, virtualization tools that are open source and just as capable. Allocating a few percent of one’s budget to test these solutions makes good sense.”
Broadcom, not the only price-hiker
In October 2025, the Cour des comptes published a report on the sovereignty challenges of civil-state IT systems. VMware is mentioned.
Administrations are protected by multi-year framework contracts, notes Emmanuel Markovitch, a section leader in the Court’s first chamber. The pricing policy shift by Broadcom nonetheless produced a 35% premium for the AIFE (Agency for State Financial IT). He also cites that moving to the cloud often accompanies such policy shifts… often translated into surcharges. For example, Chorus software, whose older version ran on SAP; a version upgrade forced a major migration, and the AIFE studied the possibility of changing vendors. Scenario simulations showed a surcharge ranging from 110% to 160%, i.e., an additional €64 million.
Bad surprises with Citrix
For Cigref members (the Club of large French enterprises), the transition can extend over three, four, or five years, notes Henri d’Agrain. The association’s general delegate observes that by the end of the process, organizations often end up with an equivalent solution, without meaningful productivity gains. They have simply left a relationship that had become toxic, with the risk of creating another one. There are examples of companies that contemplated moving from VMware to Citrix—only to see similar lock-in mechanisms reappear, especially after the arrival of a former executive who led VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom.
