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Broadcom's overhaul of VMware licensing pushed a majority of customers to evaluate alternatives. These paths compare the realistic options.

Database licensing — especially Oracle and SQL Server — is among the costliest line items in IT. These paths weigh the migration effort against the savings.

Enterprise backup and disaster-recovery licensing — Veeam, Commvault, NetBackup — scales painfully with data growth. These paths weigh the re-platforming effort against recurring spend.

Observability and APM bills — Datadog, Splunk, New Relic — are usage-based and grow with every host and gigabyte. These paths compare the move to open-source and lower-cost stacks.

Enterprise storage arrays and SAN software — Dell, NetApp, Pure — carry premium hardware plus capacity-based licensing. These paths compare moving to software-defined and open storage.

OS subscriptions — Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Windows Server, SUSE — are recurring per-vCPU or per-socket costs. These paths compare moving to free or lower-cost distributions.

Identity and access management — Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Ping — price per user and per feature. These paths compare self-hosted, open-source identity platforms.

Endpoint and security-platform licensing — CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Symantec — bills per endpoint and per module. These paths compare open-source and lower-cost security stacks.

HashiCorp's BSL license change pushed Terraform, Vault, and Consul users toward open forks. These paths compare the drop-in open-source replacements.

Managed Kubernetes platforms — OpenShift, Tanzu, Docker EE — carry per-core or per-node subscriptions. These paths compare moving to upstream Kubernetes and open distributions.

Cloud data-warehouse spend — Snowflake, Teradata, BigQuery — is usage-based and hard to forecast. These paths compare moving to open columnar engines and lakehouses.

DevOps platform seats — GitLab, Azure DevOps, Bamboo — are billed per user and per pipeline minute. These paths compare moving to self-hosted, open-source toolchains.

Application delivery controllers — F5, Citrix NetScaler, A10 — carry per-instance and throughput-tier licensing. These paths compare moving to open-source proxies and load balancers.

Network hardware and NOS licensing — Cisco, Juniper, Arista — bundle smart-licensing subscriptions with premium hardware. These paths compare moving to open network operating systems.

Next-gen firewall licensing — Palo Alto, Fortinet, Check Point — stacks per-appliance costs with threat-subscription bundles. These paths compare moving to open-source firewalls.

Messaging and streaming licensing — Confluent, IBM MQ, TIBCO — is priced per core or by throughput. These paths compare moving to open-source brokers and streaming platforms.

Proprietary LLM APIs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini — bill per token and send data off-premises. These paths compare moving high-volume workloads to self-hosted open-weight models.

Cross-cloud migration — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OCI — is driven by cost optimization, lock-in avoidance, and strategic or compliance needs. These paths compare moving workloads between the major clouds.

Moving workloads from on-premise to the cloud — or repatriating from the cloud back to on-prem / private cloud. These paths weigh elasticity and opex against steady-state run cost.