Broadcom’s recent moves to reinvent customer use and payment of its VMware subsidiary have sent shockwaves through the enterprise space, an impact that Rimini Street is hoping to temper with a new support program.

Rimini Street recently launched a VMware-focused offering that includes support and advisory services, security services and a consulting service targeted at VMware offerings. These VMware services have recently been run through a Broadcom update that has upended legacy perpetual license models for new subscription plans.

David Rowe, EVP for global transformation at Rimini Street, told SDxCentral that these changes have spurred many of Rimini Street’s enterprise clients to ask for support help. This includes some of the more than 375,000 enterprises Rimini Street said are using VMware services.

Rimini Street has been providing platform support services since 2005, and is most known for its support of Oracle, SAP and IBM systems. Rowe said the firm acts as a third-party support system at a fraction of the cost of what a named vendor will charge.

“The concept is, you know how you can take your car to the corner mechanic? You don't have to go to the dealer. You can find someone else besides the manufacturer to fix your dishwasher. You could never do that for your enterprise software,” Rowe said. “Organizations paid millions of dollars in license fees and then paid annual maintenance fees, often about 22% of the original license costs and they go up every year. Rimini Street replaces that annual support program.”

The Rimini Street services specifically include its Support, Protect and Consult for VMware products. These services are designed to provide VMware users with support for their current, paid-for and perpetually licensed VMware infrastructure.

“I think customers in many cases are pretty unhappy with the size of the increases and the switch to the subscription, which drives kind of a different model,” Rowe said. “It feels sort of Oracle-like to them, so I think some customers are taking it personal.”

Rimini Street support option pricing is variable depending on requirements, but Rowe said it’s in line with what enterprises were paying for support on their legacy VMware plans. That could prove compelling.

“What this gives customers is, if they haven't already, they don't have to switch over to VMware subscription pricing to maintain their license and get support,” Rowe said. “They can continue to run their perpetual licenses that they acquired. Their VMware support can run out and Rimini Street provides support for them.”

A recent Forrester Research report found that one VMware client is experiencing a 500% price increase based on their current use of VMware products and how it maps to the new licensing and packaging. Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester Research, told SDxCentral that these pricing changes were not unexpected and that he and his team had predicted 20% of the world’s largest enterprises “will start to exit – read these words very carefully – will start to exit the VMware stack.”

“They will not do a full replacement overnight, but in parts, they will start to move away,” Chhabra said. “I clearly see that happening right now and I don’t need to go another five months to claim that that prediction was true. It is happening.”

Is it the same VMware support?

Rowe explained that the Rimini Street support program taps into the firm’s more than 20 years of working with enterprises and platform vendors. It also takes advantage of the fact that these VMware platforms are “pretty mature software.”

“But when things come up, we have a variety of ways we address issues,” Rowe said. “For security it could be configuration, it could be firewall, it could be deploying a solution that we have specifically. We also have security vulnerability assessment reports for any vulnerability that's reported. We create this report that has the mitigation components as a part of it and we provide that to clients. There's a comprehensive set of security capabilities that we offer and it's an important part of what we do.”

Broadcom has also recently committed to continue support for high severity security issues that might crop up in VMware software even if a customer is no longer part of a VMware subscription package. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan explained in a blog post that this includes “free access to zero-day security patches for supported versions of vSphere, and we’ll add other VMware products over time.”

Rowe also highlighted Rimini Street’s consulting service that can help enterprises gauge their overall need for continuing with VMware platforms.

The most important advantage is time

While the Rimini Street option should allow for support and price continuity, Rowe did note that perhaps the most important advantage of its support program is time.

“The way I think it'll play out is as organizations try to figure out their roadmap, we just give them the time and the flexibility to do that without having to pay more money in the meantime,” Rowe said. “They may actually end up with some mission-critical, customer-facing instances on VMware that continue, and they may even go back to VMware for that over time, but they may also leverage Microsoft, and they may leverage Nutanix. There's lots of options that can be leveraged in other ways.”

This speaks to repeated concerns from industry analysts that have cited immediate concern from enterprises that have been deeply invested in the VMware ecosystem. Forrester’s Chhabra said that while the VMware issue is top of mind for many of his clients, “unfortunately, very few of them are proactive.”

“Almost all other tech decision makers, they are within one year to six weeks of decision making,” Chhabra said. “They don’t have much time left and most all of them are seeing the impact in terms of the pricing because they have to execute, they have to make a decision in the next five, six weeks or five, six months.”

As a public company, Rimini Street obviously has ulterior motives to getting VMware customer to sign up for its services. But for many of these enterprises, gaining time from that decision could be worth the price.

“The Gartner’s and Forrester’s report there's a lot of unhappy customers so they just they appreciate having an option,” Rowe added. “That's really all we are is an option and we help educate customers and then they can make their own choices as to how it relates to their strategy.”