Brussels, 15th September 2026. European businesses, from SMEs to the largest public and private sector organisations, face diminishing choice and control over their cloud and AI operations as dominant software providers escalate their unfair licensing practices. Broadcom remains the most flagrant example of unfair competition, but SAP has embarked on increasingly worrying practices as well. These are the conclusions of the Fourth ECCO Report from the European Cloud Competition Observatory, published today.
Created by CISPE, with Cigref and Beltug as observers, the European Cloud Competition Observatory (ECCO) monitors how dominant software providers shape competition, choice and control across Europe’s cloud and AI markets.
Broadcom continues to extend practices that limit choice, raise costs and lock in customers whilst destroying the economic viability of many European cloud providers’ business models. As such, its Red status – denoting a critical situation with little or insufficient progress in addressing concerns – is reconfirmed. The Fourth ECCO Report details that Broadcom has:
- Excluded the vast majority of European CSPs from offering VMware services under any terms;
- Removed end customers’ Bring Your Own License (‘BYOL’) rights, restricting them to Broadcom’s own choice of a few hand-picked partners to host their workloads;
- Imposed relentless unilateral contractual changes and cost increases that are driving European CSPs out of the market.
Meanwhile, Broadcom is waging ‘lawfare’ to obstruct investigations of its practices, including denying European Commission access to critical documents, whilst using marketing and PR to cast itself as a champion of European cloud and sovereignty.
Recent licence changes at SAP have also raised concerns among customers and competitors in Europe, several of which the Fourth ECCO report details. ECCO has given SAP an Amber Status indicating that more must be done to protect choice and fair software licensing in Europe. Its concerns fall into two main areas:
- Anticompetitive licensing measures that direct customers to SAP’s own cloud offers to the detriment of independent European cloud vendors; and,
- Emerging concerns over restrictions to agentic AI data access.
The focus of this ECCO report is SAP’s emerging strategy in the agentic AI domain – a market that is rapidly becoming the primary interface layer for enterprise data. The concerns are specific, substantial, and in ECCO’s assessment potentially anticompetitive.
ECCO is also monitoring the proposed acquisition of Hugging Face by NVIDIA. CISPE calls on the European Commission to scrutinise this transaction closely to avoid repeating the mistakes it made in clearing Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware – a decision that has since inflicted serious harm on European cloud providers and their customers. The acquisition will be assessed in detail in the next ECCO report.
Francisco Mingorance, speaking on behalf of CISPE, commented:
“ECCO was created to scrutinise dominant software providers that seek to tilt the cloud and AI market in their favour to lock in customers and lock out competitors. Some have come to the table to find solutions that work for everyone. Broadcom has not. It keeps turning the screws on our members, refuses to engage, and is now withholding documents from the European Commission.
The Commission must act now, and act boldly. With licence termination dates looming, European vendors and customers alike face cliff-edge decisions. Without urgent imposition of interim measures European vendors will lose business – forced to hand customers to their competitors among Broadcom’s chosen partners. Customers will be pushed into signing new contracts with a Broadcom approved partner which may or may not align with their sector, operational, sovereignty or data-localisation requirements.”
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For further information, please contact:
Ben Maynard
Director of Communications, CISPE
+44 7968537982