Navigating Vendor Challenges: Lessons from Oracle to VMware
Timothy Chester reflects on his experiences managing vendor licensing challenges, comparing Oracle's past strategies with today's issues from Broadcom and VMware. He explores how higher education institutions can learn from history to better handle vendor relationships and costs.
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Chapter 1
Introduction
Timothy Chester
When I started my first CIO role at Pepperdine, I inherited a troubled PeopleSoft implementation that had been complicated by Oracle’s acquisition. The institution had overbought PeopleSoft licenses and quickly learned that scaling back drove costs up, as Oracle tied discounts to maintaining the full footprint. Some institutions responded by turning to the open-source Kuali project in hopes of escaping Oracle’s control. But the effort consumed millions while never delivering at scale. This proved to be a strategic misstep of chasing independence rather than maximizing vendor partnerships. Today, Broadcom has stepped into Oracle’s old role, increasing costs for its VMware product suite in ways that feel punishingly familiar. Yet VMware remains indispensable for institutions running on-premises finance, HR, and student systems. In today’s Dispatch, we want to discuss how today’s VMware problem looks a lot like the challenges higher education faced with Oracle twenty years ago, and how CIOs should approach today’s challenge much, much differently.