Partners turn to Nutanix for VMware alternative

Merger and acquisition activity in the technology sector is expected to accelerate in the months ahead and while this may cause some disruption among key players, implications for customers can cut deep. 

The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom left many customers in the dark and seeking guidance on how to navigate the disruptive change.

Some customers took a ‘wait and see’ approach, while others signed multi-year deals to maintain their current environment to delay making major decisions until they reached the end of their lifecycle. What they didn’t bet on was Broadcom hiking up prices — in some cases, ten-fold. 

This has put many partners in a position to try and seek out alternative hyper converged infrastructure technologies and arrangements — such as Nutanix, which has been steadily gaining ground on switching up customer environments in the market.

Nutanix Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) vice president of partner sales Michael Magura claimed Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware turned a big page in the history of the IT industry, having a serious ripple effect in the market. 

During a discussion, Magura explained how these changes were impacting customers and prospects and how it was helping partners mitigate the risks, increase their security and discover opportunities to migrate to different solutions such as Nutanix.

NTT Singapore vice president of innovation and technology solutions Pranay Anand, Qirx CEO Nick Winch, Think Solutions sales director Pedro Duarte and India’s Tech9Labs founder and CEO Amit Jain also joined the discussion. 

For the first time, Winch said it was looking at options that it wouldn’t have previously considered. As a Canberra-based organisation, the government sector is a dominant market sweet spot for Qirx. 

“With HCI, Nutanix cloud manager, we lead the conversation with any clients that are at the pointy end of their hardware cycle or they’re already running VMware vSAN. It gives us a like-for-like replacement and we’re getting a lot of traction in these discussions,” Winch said. 

While Broadcom has revealed its VMware strategy to focus on the top-end of the market, its left many customers and partners alike in the dust, seeking alternative arrangements. 

“While it may be a small market to VMware, it’s an exceptionally large number that are unhappy,” Winch said.

“Customers [are] worried about what that means for costs moving forward and they’re fed up with the lack of local support because the VMware people are now too focused on the high-end because that’s what they’re being measured on; these customers have been left in a vacuum.” 

Jain added VMware had been an important part of the technology landscape for many customers to host their applications – whether on-premises or in the cloud.

“It makes them anxious to think about what they should really be looking for next – whether it’s a wait and watch strategy, whether they should rip and replace, or whether they should have a plan/vendor B, there’s still a lot of uncertainty,” Jain said. 

“Increasing prices for the sake of it, doesn’t really work without a good value proposition and customer support has always had a question mark. 

“It’s not a good reaction in the market at this point in time.”

From Anand’s experience, he said he has clients in three camps — one group that did plan ahead due to previous experiences, another that took a ‘wait and see’ approach and a third that recognised they left it too late to take action. 

“This VMware and Broadcom acquisition didn’t put clients in the center and that’s been a big challenge,” Anand said. 

For the customers caught up in the middle of all this, Anand said they strategically signed multi-year license agreement deals just to buy some more time, but the bill shock has caught them out. 

For Australian mid-market clients, Duarte said that many didn’t have the budget to move off and renew licensing agreements with alternative options, therefore exposing them to risks. 

“It’s the first time I’ve heard a vendor expose their customer to that sort of risk,” Duarte said.

“We’ve got customers who are going without support and security hotfixes, just riding it out.

“Some of these customers are years away from their lifecycle refreshes and that’s a lot of exposure that they’ve got to carry for multiple years.”

With the amount of consolidation happening across the vendor landscape, partners are taking a dual-vendor approach to customer engagements.

“It’s prudent now for us to bring in the added value in anything we do and look at dual vendor strategies across everything,” Anand added. 

A balanced approach – Nutanix, AWS or Azure?

There are not very many options on the table with many customers turning to Nutanix, AWS or Azure to help remedy their precarious situation. 

“Customers have to really think for their business rather than technology,” Jain said. 

“We’re conducting multiple workshops with the clients, really understanding whether they should seriously stick with VMware despite whatever demands if the business really needs it. We have also been working on defining agile planning and transition strategies.

“We need to ensure that whatever disruption happens with these acquisitions,  in whatever capacities and capabilities the partners may support, we should be absolutely ready.

While the COVID-19 pandemic forced a massive move towards cloud technologies, post-pandemic, customers started to move environments back on-premises. 

“Does that risk appetite allow you to move or do you make the investment instead?” Jain said.

“It’s a double edged sword for most of my clients, how am I approaching the dual vendor strategy is one conversation.

“It all starts with, where are we today? Is there a need to hyperscale? Or what are those workloads? Understand the data patterns because if you are going to quiz them, every other time you will be hit with an increase in ingress and egress charges, so what workloads do you keep on-premise or in a hybrid center?”

Duarte said it was having many customer discussions on their options, and working on pre-sales activities around scoping and migration.

“The reality is these things will take time,” Duarte said. 

“Our job is to take the broad set of technology options and fine tune it down to a customer’s requirements, but when we look at the private cloud stack, and specifically the virtualisation stack, over the years that that actual choice is diminished.

“It’s a journey to migrate a customer to Nutanix and guide them in the right direction.”