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Almost every Broadcom customer we talk to describes the same experience. The renewal is months away, you ask for numbers, and nothing comes. Then the quote lands with weeks to go, it is much bigger than you expected, and by the time you have understood it there is no room left to do anything but sign. I am Tom, Daniel is with me, and we want to be careful in this episode, because the honest version of this story is more useful to you than the angry version, and it is also the one that survives being repeated to your own board.
So let us be precise. There is no published Broadcom policy of quoting late, and we are not going to claim there is one. What exists is documentation, case by case, in court filings. UnitedHealthcare pleads that Broadcom promised a proposal and then delivered it on the fourteenth of February against an expiry of the thirtieth of March, which its complaint describes as an obvious effort to exploit a fast approaching renewal.
Tesco received its offer roughly six weeks before its mainframe agreement expired. Those are two named enterprises, in filings, under their own names. That is evidence. It is not a policy, and the distinction matters when you repeat it.
And here is the part that makes the intent question almost irrelevant. Three mechanics produce the same outcome without anyone needing to plan it. First, the twenty percent surcharge for renewing after your anniversary date, which turns delay into a direct price increase that lands on you rather than on them. Second, quotes gated behind validation output proving your live estate, so the clock does not even start until you have produced data that takes weeks to assemble.
Third, quote validity windows compressing toward fourteen days, against internal capital approval cycles that run thirty to sixty. Put those together and lateness is structural.
Think about whose clock is actually binding. Broadcom's constraint is a quarter end. Yours is a procurement process, a legal review, a security review, possibly a board or a committee that meets monthly, and a finance function that will not approve unbudgeted spend at short notice. Those are not comparable clocks.
A fourteen day quote window is comfortable for the party that wrote it and close to impossible for the party receiving it. So the pressure you feel is real, and it is not primarily about the price on the page. It is about the fact that your organisation physically cannot evaluate an alternative in the time you have been given.
So the counter is not a complaint, it is a calendar, and the runway is not optional. Consider the evidence on how long leaving takes. BMC has the strongest commercial motive in the market to make leaving Broadcom sound easy, and BMC will not claim a migration under nine months. Its own planning guidance runs eighteen months to two years, plus a three month contingency.
That is the friendly number, from the vendor that wants you to switch. So a threat raised inside six months, with no assessment done and no partner engaged, is not a threat. It is a bluff with a visible tell.
And they will test it. Broadcom's team can quote UnitedHealthcare's own pleading, that an exit would take years, straight back across the table, because a customer said it under oath to win an injunction. So credibility has to be demonstrated rather than asserted. A credible position looks like this: the assessment is finished, a migration partner is under contract, a pilot workload has actually moved, and there is a board approved date.
At that point you are not threatening anything. You are describing a plan that is already funded and running, and the conversation changes completely, because now their clock is the one that matters.
Three things, then. Start eighteen months out on mainframe and nine on VMware, because those are the runways the evidence supports, not the ones that feel comfortable. Ask for your quote in writing at a fixed date, and put the request in early enough that silence itself becomes a documented fact you can point to later. And decommission anything you are not using before the count is taken, because every measurement in this relationship becomes a baseline you then pay against.
Next time, Claire and I look at what happens when you do not accept the price, which is the audit, and at the machine that has quietly replaced it.
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