VMware’s new promotion aims to inspire customers to more deeply consider moving away from VMware. While several third-party surveys have indicated that a large number of VMware customers want to reduce or eliminate their VMware usage over the next few years, concerns about time and cost are also expected to slow or disrupt migration plans, especially given that migration may require paying for two virtualization products simultaneously.
“One of the big things we see is that as customers go through this journey of changing their operating models, you’re seeing double the spend,” said Fidelma Russo, EVP and CTO of VMware, according to The Register.
Dean Colpitts, CTO of Canadian managed services provider (MSP) Member IT Group (MITG), which VMware dropped from its reseller program a year ago after a 19-year partnership, doesn’t expect the promotion to drive much sales.
“All of our customers work on a three-, four- or five-year life cycle and typically factor that into their initial purchasing,” he told Ars. “The biggest issue I see right now is impacting sales and adoption of VM Essentials [that] High DRAM Prices and Constraints [are] “This is impacting customers’ ability to obtain new hardware to migrate.”
Colpitts pointed to the lack of available hardware for a permanent migration and “facilitated a temporary brownfield reimage of a customer’s existing appliances from VMware to VM Essentials.”
On the other hand, San Diego-based NTH Generation, one of Apache’s largest channel partners, is expecting to quadruple its “VM Essentials sales pipeline and grow sales at the same rate” due to the Apache promotion, CRN reported.
“These additional free licensing and migration capabilities will significantly reduce the risk of moving to VM Essentials,” Dan Molina, co-president and CTO of Nth Generation, told the publication.
partner promotion
Apache also announced that it will give three years of free VM Essentials software licenses to 600 reseller partners who earn the Private Cloud with Virtualization qualification by the end of the year. However, partners must still pay support costs.
Colpitts said the benefits are “a step in the right direction”, but limiting the promotion to 600 participants is “very short-sighted”. He believes that VMware should give all of its partners “the ability to get access” to VM Essentials. [VM Essentials] in customer sites and displacing competitors.”
“They need to run away [VM Essentials] as far and fast as possible [can] To immediately gain traction and attract ISVs, which will increase adoption even more,” he said.
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