A business unit belonging to Taiwanese electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn is the latest to have weaned itself off VMware, jumping ship to rising hyperconverged star Arcfra.

First spotted by The Register, a customer success story posted by the Singaporean vendor details how it wooed the Nvidia, Intel, and Apple partner's unit. According to Arcfra, it wanted a “global production cloud” but was hampered by high construction costs and “a significant increase in operations and maintenance (O&M) overhead” from traditional VMware virtualization.

A proof-of-concept (PoC) test of Arcfra’s Enterprise Cloud Platform (AECP) that saw t deployment across multiple branch factories, providing microsegmentation-based network security for "demilitarized zone" environments – isolated subnets that separate private local networks, like those on a factory floor in Foxconn’s case, to the internet.

Arcfra’s granular microsegmentation via its network service (ANS) created a robust quarantine barrier for the Foxconn unit’s mission-critical internal networks, while the vendor’s Kubernetes engine (AKE) supported container workloads.

The tests were compelling enough for the Foxconn unit to ditch VMware, with Arcfra’s AECP offering now supporting its IT infrastructure across factories in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and North America.

According to the blog post, legacy VMware virtualization and storage area network (SAN) architectures have been replaced with Arcfra offerings, with the vendor claiming the change “lays the groundwork” to power expanded AI workloads and edge computing integrations.

The pair have been working together for just under a year, with an Arcfra post dated August 2025 referencing its work with the manufacturing giant. That initial post described the Foxconn unit’s previous IT setup as “a constant headache” for its IT teams to manage.

The latest post states that the unit plans to expand its work with Arcfra by building active-active stretched clusters – nodes that span sites within an adjacent geographical range with low-latency networking between facilities – across its factories.

Who is VMware challenger Arcfra?

The likes of Nutanix and Red Hat have moved to capture significant momentum and market share from disgruntled VMware customers in the year.

Arcfra is a newer player in this space, having only been founded in 2024, but has quickly pushed its way to the fore.

Having secured backing from the likes of venture capital firm and Temasek subsidiary Vertex Holdings, Arcfra found its way into Gartner’s "Market Guide for Full-Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software (HCI)," with it recognized as a "representative vendor" in 2025. The analyst giant’s recent "Guide to Choosing a VMware Alternative" report identified Arcfra as a "sample vendor," drawing praise for its “robust integration capabilities and adaptability for immediate needs.”

Wenhao Xu, who co-founded Chinese hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) player SmartX, serves as CEO. Xu, who, per his LinkedIn got his start as a summer intern at VMware back in 2010, now leads a virtualization player looking to capture discontent among VMware users in Asia.

Joining Foxconn as Arcfra customers include Korean e-commerce solutions providers ConnectWave and Cafe24.

Arcfra’s Foxconn win marks a series of recent VMware exits that have seen Pennsylvania-based convenience store chain Sheetz migrate to StorMagic and Western Union jump across to Nutanix. T-Mobile US, Tesco, and Siemens have also put the Broadcom-owned brand on blast in recent weeks.

UPDATE: This story has been updated post-publication to reflect that the Foxconn deployment only covered a single business unit. The entire company has not moved to Arcfra. The story has been updated to reflect this.