Broadcom rivals concede that the new VMware parent is continuing to do a good job in stemming the near-term outflow of large VMware customers, but smaller VMware customers looking to change vendors can do so in as little as a month.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami during that vendor’s latest earnings call downplayed near-term benefits from VMware customers potentially migrating their operations to Nutanix’s platform, noting that the opportunity remains a multiyear trajectory.

“The market continues to be dynamic, but from our perspective it's still largely unchanged in terms of our opportunity, multiyear opportunity to gain share,” Ramaswami said in response to questions from financial analysts. “We haven't seen a significant change in that this quarter compared to the last several quarters really. And we haven't seen any real meaningful changes in our win-loss rates either on these opportunities.”

Ramaswami said that the “unchanged” progress is often tied to current VMware renewal cycles.

“They’re tied to when the installed base is coming up for hardware refresh, although we are also expanding our ability to capture, to have our solutions work on existing hardware,” Ramaswami said, noting the vendor’s work with Dell Technologies. That work includes new offerings targeted at easing enterprise hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and data center storage management challenges.

“The three-tier work that we’re doing with Dell or continuing to be able to deploy our software on already existing VMware HCI customers,” Ramaswami added.

Broadcom is also continuing to stifle potential losses, especially with larger customers. Ramaswami had previously noted Broadcom’s willingness to show pricing flexibility when dealing with larger customers, and Broadcom has more recently enhanced features and benefits on some of VMware’s slimmed down product offerings.

“It's a dynamic market in the sense that sometimes we'll see aggressive behavior from Broadcom as well to keep those customers, especially the very large ones,” Ramaswami said. “So really, I would say net-net, nothing much has changed.”

Equity research firm William Blair in a recent Nutanix report mentioned that market research firms were predicting up to 30% of VMware’s installed base of more than 400,000 customers “will eventually switch away from VMware.” That sentiment was echoed by Forrester Research Principal Analyst Naveen Chhabra who told SDxCentral up to 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.”

Nutanix during its most recent quarter managed to add 630 new customers, with William Blair analysts noting in a report “Nutanix seeing steady VMware displacements amid high customer dissatisfaction.”

Nutanix is among a number of vendors that have been looking to take advantage of Broadcom’s changes at VMware.

IBM CFO James Kavanaugh recently told an investor conference that its Red Hat division was positioned to receive some of that potential flow of dissatisfied VMware customers, though the timing could extend out for several years.

“What it’s forcing right now with the Broadcom acquisition is it’s forcing every enterprise client to make platform architecture decisions, and that’s going to be between virtualization and containerization,” Kavanaugh said, touting IBM’s consulting services, its Watson X generative artificial intelligence (genAI) platform, and Red Hat OpenShift. “That’s why clients are coming to us with extreme interest around a growth factor that I think will play out for multiple years, and we’re excited about that.”

This timing aligned with a recent William Blair enterprise survey that found “while the vast majority of customers have ponied up with VMware at least for another year (due to immediate challenges in shifting off), many customers and channels feel burned by Broadcom,” adding that this has led to disgruntled customers looking at near- to mid-term alternative offerings from vendors like Nutanix, Red Hat, Microsoft, Scale Computing, and public cloud providers.

How long does it take to turn a VMware customer? Nutanix’s Ramaswami during the earnings call provided additional color on how long it might take for those disgruntled VMware customers to migrate their platforms to a new provider. The executive explained that “on the easy side” were current vSphere customers “and they’re willing to replace their hardware, it’s a very easy migration. We can migrate that within a month or two off a relatively small scale.”

Ramaswami noted that a lot of that migration is automated and that a similar timeframe could be had for customers moving between public cloud providers.

“There was a question earlier about VMware Cloud on AWS [Amazon Web Services],” Ramaswami further explained. “Those offerings are actually very easy to migrate. Again, within a month we can have these customers off and onto a Nutanix offering.”

However, more complex and larger migrations “can be many years.”

“At the other end of the spectrum are these large customers that use multiple VMware products with massive estates,” Ramaswami said. “It can be three years to do a migration just because they can’t migrate all of it at once. There is a requirement for professional services engagements to convert over some of their more complex custom scripts that they have written and custom investments they’ve made on top of the VMware portfolio. So those migrations tend to be more complex, require professional services, and take a few years.”

Forrester’s Chhabra highlighted this complexity is a significant challenge for those customers due to how engrained VMware products have become in the enterprise.

“When I talk to the clients, I’m telling them that with dependencies it might not be easy to simply replace or swap a VMware hypervisor with another hypervisor because of the ecosystem impact, because of the ecosystem effect,” Chhabra said. “I think the power of VMware is not because of the VMware technology, it is because of the network effect. It’s both the north and south ecosystem partnerships that VMware had developed over the years, and that brings power to the VMware options.”

Broadcom, for its part, remains confident on its VMware options.

CEO Hock Tan during the vendor’s second-quarter earnings call earlier this year said that it had signed up nearly 3,000 of its 10,000 largest customers to VMware’s new subscription licensing model.

He added that “each of these customers typically sign up to a multi-year contract,” which when spread across an annualized booking value increased from $1.2 billion during the first quarter of this year to $1.9 billion in its latest Q2.

“We’re making good progress,” Tan said of its move to sign legacy VMware customers to the new licensing model. “The journey is not over, by any means, but it’s very much to expectation moving to subscription.”