New Solution for the VMware Mandatory Compliance Reporting

As a former software auditor, it came to my attention that VMware (by Broadcom) has gone on a journey to force its clients with additional burden for administrative reporting. In my opinion, VMware displays a serious distrust towards their clients just to boost their revenue again. Let me explain what the issue is.

The Issue

Recently, VMware (by Broadcom) updated its Program Documentation to include a paragraph on Mandatory Compliance Reporting. This requires customers to submit a Compliance Report every 180 days.

Mandatory Compliance Reporting
Customer must provide Broadcom with a Compliance Report (as defined above) every 180 days by ensuring that the Compliance Report files generated by the Software are either transmitted by the Software or uploaded by Customer in accordance with the product Documentation.

Failure to Report
Customer’s failure to transmit or upload a timely, unaltered Compliance Report, in accordance with the Documentation will result in the following:
– Commencing one hundred and eighty (180) days from the date that a Compliance Report becomes overdue, Customer will receive warnings within the Software, and
– Commencing two hundred and seventy (270) days from the date that a Compliance Report becomes overdue, features and functionalities of the management plane of the Software will be degraded and/or blocked;

Assumption of Risk of Failure to Report
Customer assumes any and all risks associated with the loss of any and all functionality and patch access when caused by Customer’s failure to provide timely, unaltered Compliance Reports.

My Conclusion

This implies that VMware has added functionality to its software that can limit some or all functionalities if compliance reports are not submitted on time. This can seriously affect your (Business-Critical) Systems running on such platforms, and you run a serious risk of loosing business continuity. Adding such clauses to contracts may indicate a focus on ensuring proper licensing compliance; however I do see it as a distrust in clients.

In my 20+-year career in software compliancy, I have not encountered any client that was willingly, knowingly or purposely incompliant. It is the complicated licensing rules, specific architectures and/ or solutions or communications that lead to compliancy situations.

My Solution

As an alternative, a solution has been developed by PlanJB for clients to transition away from VMware to any another (hypervisor) architecture. This migration solution is based on their existing VMware licenses and aims to save between 30% to 80% of yearly costs compared to VMware’s subscription model. For more information, please contact me via DM or through the contact form on this website