Your VMware Strategy,
Your Choice
How emma supports organisations that want to optimise their existing VMware environments — and those that are ready to move beyond them.
The Broadcom-VMware acquisition has placed VMware strategy at the centre of every IT budget conversation. Licensing costs are rising, subscription models are replacing perpetual licences, and for European organisations a parallel regulatory pressure has emerged: the question of who ultimately controls their data.
Organisations are divided into two camps — those wanting to optimize their VMware estate to manage costs, and those migrating away from VMware. emma is an independent European cloud operations platform purpose-built to serve both paths without adding new lock-in, without disrupting existing environments, and with full data sovereignty for organisations that require it.
According to a recent report surveying 302 IT decision-makers two years after the Broadcom acquisition:
The predicted mass exodus never materialised. VMware environments are deeply embedded in enterprise infrastructure, often representing years of architectural decisions, operational processes, and application dependencies. As a result, many organisations are discovering that exiting VMware is far more complex than expected.
In fact, 63% of respondents report changing their exit strategy two or more times, and organisations undertaking migrations are finding the timeline far longer than anticipated. What was initially planned as a six-month transition is often becoming an 18–24 month effort.
Whether organizations choose to optimize their VMware environments or begin migrating away from them, emma supports both strategies through a single governance layer that spans on-premises VMware, public cloud hyperscalers, and EU-sovereign providers simultaneously.
For organisations that are staying on VMware — or managing a multi-year reduction in a deliberate, controlled manner — the priority is efficiency, visibility, and cost control. emma connects directly to VMware vSphere via native integration and adds a unified management layer without disrupting existing operations.
For organisations actively reducing or eliminating their VMware footprint, migration complexity is the primary execution risk. emma addresses this by providing a governed, continuous management layer that spans the old environment and the new one — simultaneously — throughout the transition.
Geographic residency is a necessary condition for EU data sovereignty — but it is no longer a sufficient one. Regulators across Europe are converging on a stricter interpretation: sovereignty requires provable operational control, not just the location of a data centre.