Broadcom’s VMware division continues to generate high-profile headlines of big name customers looking to exit long-standing relationships due to what are viewed as unfair business practices, but some note there are a much larger number of smaller organizations with similar qualms looking for VMware alternatives.

Shane O'Rourke, senior director for global VMware support services at Spinnaker, noted that while Broadcom has focused its efforts on mostly retaining its largest VMware customers and established rivals have focused their efforts on disenchanted mid- and large-sized targets, hundreds-of-thousands of smaller players have been left looking for rational options.

“Some of these customers are large, hyperscaler, some are your mom and pops, some know what they're doing, some have no idea, and I still see the odd trend where a customer might have decided to go unsupported, thinking that over a short period of time they will have decided and have started their migration strategy, but no, it's not the case. They still don't know what they're doing. And I've got customers with Broadcom until toward the end of this year, but they're engaging with us now to have a long running period and a smooth transition over,” O’Rourke said of what he has seen in the market. “So there's a big mix of customers there in terms of where they are, what their needs are, and what their requirements are.”

O’Rourke explained that Spinnaker has been working on the support side of this problem, a path that last year included the roll out of support for VMware legacy vSphere 7 platform ahead of a planned update to that offering. Spinnaker at that time noted the move was in response to the increasingly strained relationship between VMware parent Broadcom and existing customers as the vendor's model shifts to subscription based, and was a move echoed by others in the space, including system integrators such as Caylent, OVHcloud, and Platform9.

These options are becoming more important due to what O’Rourke said have been changes to the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) support program.

“We've actually received queries from customers who are concerned,” O’Rourke said. “They have opted to VCF 8, so they moved to VCF 8 and VCF 9 is being mandated somewhat from a support viewpoint. A lot of customers have come into us looking at the option of [third-party support] because they cannot go to VCF 9 even though they're on subscription, which means they're out of support, because it may involve a hardware refresh.”

That potential refresh has been a major talking point for VMware rivals.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami noted during that vendor’s most recent earnings call that those wanting to fully deploy VCF 9 will “require a substantial hardware refresh, including their embedded storage solution.”

“VCF 9 is going to be quite a significant upgrade for you all in terms of the effort that you're going to have to put in,” Ramaswami said. “You may still not benefit from all of its capabilities. It is complex, and we have these options of external storage, public cloud, and then we have also the automated migration tools behind that, and of course the commercial incentives, all of those put together to provide a good proposition for customers to migrate, and like I said, we're seeing this with customers coming and migrating every quarter.”

Ramaswami’s thesis was backed by Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, who during an earnings call late last year that while more than 90% of VMware’s 10,000 largest customers had signed up for the VCF 9 platform that conversion rate was only in terms of license sold and not actual VCF deployments.

“I'm careful about [my] choice of words,” Tan added. “Because we have sold them on it, and they bought licenses to deploy, doesn't mean they are fully deployed.”

Tan explained that this deployment will be “the hard work over the next two years that we see happening,” but that’s the part where customers will be able to garner value from those deployments. It will also allow Broadcom to then sell more advanced services into those deployments.

“First phase is convincing people to convert from perpetual subscriptions [to] purchasing VCF,” Tan said. “Second phase is make that purchase they made on VCF create the value they look for in private cloud, on their premise, on their IT data center. That's what's happening and that will sustain for quite a while, because on top of that, we will start selling advanced services, security, disaster recovery, even AI running AI workloads. All that is very exciting.”

The door of opportunity mixes both ways

While this might be an “exciting” opportunity for Broadcom to sell more, it also could open an avenue for customers to leave.

O’Rourke said that Spinnaker is now working toward providing a more coherent migration path for those looking to move on from VMware, moves that O’Rourke said is becoming an increasingly common occurrence.

“From customers who are underway, I'm seeing a mix,” O’Rourke said of that process. “Obviously there's your alternatives, so your OpenStack, your Red Hat, and some customers are splitting, like Google Cloud VMware Engine, they're going down that route.”

O’Rourke noted that this interest is about customers looking to not make the same mistake twice.

“I'm starting to see more customers looking at open-source alternatives, for example, to move away from that lock-in that seems to be coming across quite strong from a lot of customers at the moment,” O’Rourke said. “Whereas initially they might have been thinking alternatives like the ones I mentioned, but now they're actually going, ‘hold on, we need to consider other options here,’ which is interesting. It's very interesting to kind of see that change and will be interesting to see what happens there.”

Analysts have been noting the possibility of enterprises seeking open-source alternatives to VMware, with many citing hypervisor options like Hyper V, the Linux kernel-based virtual machine (KVM), Proxmox, and Oracle. OpenStack has also been offered up as one of those solutions, backed by the Open Infrastructure Foundation having touted significant migration of its member base to the open-source platform.

O’Rourke noted that these options are opening opportunities for new entrants to piece together platforms that can be more curated to the needs of those legacy VMware customers looking for alternatives.

“I don't think overall in the industry that you can say there's a hard date or whatever, it's going to kind of be continuing, and the industry changes so quickly,” O’Rourke said. “A year-and-a-half-ago, which is not a long period of time, you didn't really hear about open source, I rarely heard it. All I heard was Nutanix and Red Hat, whereas now you're starting to hear others kind of options are in the mix.”