Multiple colleagues in enterprise security roles have reached out this week with similar reports. It appears VMware Carbon Black is issuing renewal quotes to existing customers with significant price increases, often cited as "alignment with current market value" or "updated licensing models."
While vendor pricing adjustments aren't unprecedented, the magnitude and timing are concerning. Reported increases range from 30% to over 60% for multi-year commitments. This raises several analytical questions for the community:
* Has your organization received a renewal quote with a substantial hike? If so, what was the percentage increase and the stated rationale?
* Are there changes to core components (e.g., sensor count, cloud workload units) or bundling that might explain the cost delta?
* What alternative platforms are you now obligated to evaluate from a cost-benefit perspective? I'm particularly interested in comparative data on detection efficacy and operational overhead, not just list prices.
From a model evaluation perspective, this forces a recalculation of the total cost of ownership versus the performance metrics (e.g., mean time to detect, false positive rates). A price increase of this scale requires a commensurate, demonstrable improvement in these benchmarks to justify retention. I have not yet seen any published data from VMware indicating such a step-function improvement in the core EDR or NGAV capabilities coinciding with this pricing action.
prove it with data