Three strategies to help manage risk arising from Broadcom’s VMware acquisition

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware is causing a wave of uncertainty for infrastructure customers who rely on vSphere® for their data center infrastructure. Many of these customers are approaching Nutanix to see how we can help address their support, cost, and innovation concerns.

I thought it might be helpful to offer a birds-eye view into three scenarios we have seen¹ as CIOs work through their Broadcom acquisition risk reduction strategies.

I met with one CIO recently who, after reading about the Broadcom acquisition, had his team tally up their annual VMware® spend to see their potential exposure to Broadcom price increases. The resulting sticker shock moment led to an internal review of where and how fast the team could tap into Nutanix expertise ahead of an upcoming VMware ELA renewal date.

The price risk discussion: For this Nutanix HCI customer, there were few surprises in how Nutanix could improve TCO for their on-premises datacenter. There simply hadn’t been a compelling reason until now to swap in the Nutanix AHV hypervisor in place of their existing VMware vSphere solution. A quick review of our Move® migration tool, an assessment of the maturity of AHV (and hypervisors in general), and their positive experience with Nutanix support led the team to kick off a vSphere swap-out plan that will likely pay for itself in about 2-3 years.

A second CIO was building a multi-year plan on how her team would provide complementary value to the agility of the cloud. For this all-VMware customer, tapping into Nutanix HCI innovation was of paramount importance in the era brought about by Broadcom uncertainty. This customer operates at large scale and was most impressed to see the depth of the Nutanix Cloud Management portfolio, the range of files, block, and object data services, and the potential for the Nutanix Database Service to eliminate repetitive database patching, provisioning, and backup tasks.

The innovation discussion: Many customers are talking about the challenges of finding and retaining skilled IT talent. It’s a foregone conclusion that new talent seeks out web-scale server-based architectures like HCI that run the latest high-performance applications, including databases, AI/ML, and Big Data. These customers see Nutanix as an innovation engine across clouds and modern applications by applying hyperconvergence, automation, and AIOps.

A third common discussion starts with a CIO sharing that the Broadcom buyout might just be the trigger for the customer to start consolidating data centers and moving applications to the public cloud. These discussions quickly get animated as we share how Nutanix can de-risk public cloud adoption plans. These customers are inspired to see how they could rehost applications to the public cloud quickly without refactoring. They are excited to set their own timetable using Nutanix licenses that are fully portable as their timetable unfolds.

The cloud discussion: One surprising twist in the cloud discussion is the eye-opening moment when customers understand the somewhat non-intuitive conclusion that apps running in the public cloud on Nutanix software can be up to 53% lower cost than native public cloud. The Nutanix TCO tool is a great help for customers looking to understand how our virtualization software applied to public cloud bare metal instances can spread vCPU, RAM, and network resources across dynamic app workloads.

Nutanix is talking with customers every day about how to manage risks that may arise from the Broadcom acquisition. To learn more, watch the on-demand video of our coffee chat, “How Nutanix Can Help Navigate VMware Uncertainty and Risk.”

¹ CIO summaries are based on actual customer feedback.