Migrations are ongoing
Broadcom introduced changes to VMware which can be especially unfriendly to small- and-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and Gartner previously predicted that 35 percent of VMware workloads would migrate else by 2028.
CloudBolt’s survey also examined how respondents are migrating workloads off of VMware. Currently, 36 percent of participants said they migrated 1–24 percent of their environment off of VMware. One other 32 percent said that they’ve migrated 25–49 percent; 10 percent said that they’ve migrated 50–74 percent of workloads; and a pair of percent have migrated 75 percent or more of workloads. Five percent of respondents said that they’ve not migrated from VMware in any respect.
Amongst migrated workloads, 72 percent moved to public cloud infrastructure as a service, followed by Microsoft’s Hyper-V/Azure stack (43 percent of respondents).
Overall, 86 percent of respondents “are actively reducing their VMware footprint,” CloudBolt’s report said.
“The fear has cooled, however the pressure hasn’t—and most teams at the moment are making practical moves to construct leverage and optionality—even when for some that features the belief that a portion of their estate never moves off VMware,” Mark Zembal, CloudBolt’s chief marketing officer, said in a press release.
While bundled products, fewer options, resellers, and better prices make VMware harder to justify for a lot of, especially SMB customers, migration is a protracted process with its own costs, including time spent researching alternatives and constructing relevant skills. CloudBolt’s reported multi-platform complexity (52 percent) and skills gaps (33 percent) topped the list of migration challenges.
“As organizations diversify away from VMware, they inherit the operational burden of managing multiple platforms with different operational and governance models,” the report reads.
While firms determine the perfect ways to limit their dependence on VMware, Broadcom can still earn cash from smaller customers it doesn’t deem needed for the long run.
“Their strategy was never to maintain every customer,” CloudBolt’s report says. “It was to maximise value from those still on the platform while the market slowly diversifies. The model assumes churn and it’s built to make the economics work anyway. Broadcom has done the maths—and so they’re nice with it.”