This week, a few vendors overplayed their hand... and the regulators politely gave them the back of theirs.

Broadcom / VMware – Forced Bundles & Financial Blackmail

Broadcom’s VMware makeover somehow managed to get even darker this week. Fidelity Investments has now taken them to court, alleging Broadcom essentially said: “Buy the new bundle or we flip the switch on your critical infrastructure.”

Fidelity warned that pulling VMware would freeze 50 million customers out of their accounts. Imagine being told your core virtualization platform, the very foundation of your IT, might vanish just because you didn’t upgrade fast enough? Sorry now, but that’s not a renewal negotiation. That’s vendor-delivered malware detonating in your data centre while they hold out a credit card machine!

This case is the perfect example of why digital sovereignty isn’t a philosophy, it’s self-defence. When a vendor like this can unilaterally threaten your operational continuity, you’re not a customer anymore, you’re a hostage.

Seeing Fidelity push back is very refreshing, rare, necessary - and personally satisfying. If they lose though, every CIO might as well just tattoo “Property of Broadcom” on their servers.

And as if that lawsuit drama wasn’t enough, Broadcom also spent the week quietly rewiring VMware’s partner ecosystem. The new partner programme scraps old tiers, tightens deal-registration rules, and rewards partners who push Broadcom’s preferred golden child: VMware Cloud Foundation. In other words, even the channel is being herded into the subscription corral.

Independent partners, the very people customers rely on for real-world advice, now get incentives only if they follow Broadcom’s choreography. That’s not ecosystem “simplification”; that’s supply-chain lock-in.

Control the licensing, control the bundles, and now control the channel that customers depend on? This is mastery at play showing how a vendor builds not just revenue, but a regime. And Broadcom is laying the bricks fast.

Microsoft – “Simplification” (ala Price Increase)

Microsoft quietly retired its volume-based EA pricing on November 1st - the only part of the agreement that ever felt like a reward for loyalty. Now everyone pays Level A pricing, whether you’re running 500 seats or 50,000. A $1.06M bill becomes $1.2M overnight. “Simplification,” apparently.

And as Redmond rolls out these changes, the EU keeps circling like an increasingly irritated hawk. From forcing the Teams unbundle to poking at Azure cloud dominance, Brussels clearly smells smoke. And let's face it, when regulators start sniffing, it’s usually because something’s burning.

Digital sovereignty is takes a real hammering here. When a single vendor can reshape your financial reality overnight, you’re not in control of your IT - you’re simply funding theirs.

Oracle – Java Audits as a Business Model

Oracle spent the week reminding the world that Java may be free to download… but very much not free to run. Reports are piling in about “friendly check-ins” morphing into full audit storms. A contractor laptop with Java? A legacy tool with a bundled JDK? Congratulations - you may now owe tens or hundreds of thousands!

A new survey shows 73% of organisations have been audited in the last three years, and nearly 80% are planning to flee to OpenJDK or anything not controlled by Oracle’s legal department. This aligns with what I tell customers daily: it’s not if you’ll be audited - it’s when.

This isn’t compliance; hmm... it actually sounds more like a mob protection racket. Oracle has turned the world’s most ubiquitous runtime into a toll booth they own. And when definitions of “usage” shift like sand, even the diligent get caught. The only winning strategy is preparation — or escape.

IBM – The Quiet Contract Assassin

While Broadcom and Oracle staged loud, theatrical shakedowns, IBM played the long game. The quiet villain in the corner rewriting the rules while no one’s watching. This week, experts highlighted IBM’s subtle contract “adjustments”: removing audit-disruption protections, adding mandatory back support fees, and tightening ILMT requirements so aggressively that one misconfiguration can upgrade you, involuntarily, to full-capacity licensing.

This is lock-in by paperwork. When you’ve got 20–30 years of mainframe or WebSphere dependencies, IBM doesn’t need to shout. They can empty your pockets with a clause tweak. It’s sovereignty erosion by slow drip, but make no mistake, the impact is seismic.

I often joke that negotiating with IBM is like playing chess with the devil, only in this version, the devil wrote the rulebook, owns the board, and quietly moves your pieces when you’re not looking!

SAP – The Lion Blinks

And finally, a sliver of good news!

Under EU antitrust pressure, SAP has offered concessions that might actually make life easier for customers. They’re scrapping the hated reinstatement fee, promising clearer pricing, and claiming they’ll make switching simpler. Yay!

Isn't it amazing how reasonable a global software giant suddenly becomes when a regulator taps it on the shoulder? ;)

This is a genuine boost for digital autonomy and proof that loud customers and regulatory teeth can pry open even the tightest of grips. SAP of course insists that this won’t hurt revenue (which tells you how confident they still are in their lock-in!), but a crack is a crack.

If nothing else, it shows us all that even the biggest cartels lose their swagger when someone bigger steps into the room.

Salesforce – AI, but Make It Expensive

Salesforce continues its campaign of “innovation by invoice.” Prices are up again. 6% this year, after 9% last year, and the AI story comes with a breathtaking price tag. Agentforce plans now run $125–$550 per user per month, and features once optional are quietly being baked into premium bundles.

This isn’t AI adoption. This is AI ransom. Want the shiny new capabilities? Well, pay more then. A lot more! And while many tout Salesforce as “customer-centric,” it’s getting harder to see the customer once you zoom in past all the billing tiers.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud, this isn’t happening in a vacuum. Gartner is already warning us that by 2027, enterprise application software costs will rise by at least 40%, driven almost entirely by how vendors are packaging and pricing their shiny new GenAI features. So, brace yourselves, the cartel has found its next excuse to hike prices! This is why Salesforce’s AI upsell isn’t an outlier. It’s the opening move in a much bigger, much more expensive game!

As I like to say, Salesforce has perfected the art of selling you your own data back with a coat of AI paint.

Rowan’s Closing Thoughts - Cracks forming

If this week proved anything, it’s that the digital cartel isn’t a group of vendors, it’s a mindset. Subscription by default. Ownership, removed. Compliance, weaponised. Bundling disguised as “value.” Switching treated as a breach of loyalty. It’s the slow suffocation of customer autonomy dressed up as innovation.

But there’s a twist; for the first time in a long time, the cartel is starting to feel pressure.

Fidelity didn’t just roll over and accept it - they sued.
The EU didn’t just “monitor” - they actually forced SAP to blink.
Microsoft’s price games are finally on the regulatory radar.
And Oracle’s Java shakedowns have triggered a mass migration to anything not controlled by Redwood Shores.

And don't believe that these are just isolated incidents. They’re tremors.

They’re real-world proof that customers, regulators, and entire industries are waking up to the fact that digital sovereignty isn’t some academic concept - it’s the difference between having control and being controlled.

So what do I think might happen next?

Well, I'd say it's a given we'll see more and more lawsuits. More scrutiny, and more CIOs quietly building exit paths, cleansing their estates of proprietary landmines, and taking second-user licences seriously.

I expect regulators to start asking the questions vendors hoped they’d never ask and I expect the vendors (sensing the tide turning) to push boundaries even more before they’re forced to behave.

Because make no mistake, the fight is only just starting. The cracks are there. And cracks, given enough pressure, eventually become breaks.

So stay awkward. Stay loud, and stay allergic to vendor nonsense.

The more daylight we shine, the more the cartel loses its power - the more sovereignty we claw back, inch by inch.