VMware, One Year Later: What your Options Look Like in 2026

00:00:01

Stephanie: Hello, and thank you, everybody, for joining us for this panel discussion today. We are calling this session VMware, One Year Later: What Your Options Look Like in 2026. And we here at Bluewave are excited to be partnering up with some organizations that we are seeing deliver creative options on the VMware renewal front, OneMind Services, and TierPoint.

And we have a great discussion ahead, but before we start, I have just a couple of housekeeping items to cover. First, we’re going to aim to run about 30 to 40 minutes today. Second, this webinar is being recorded, and you will all get a copy of the recording and the slides after the event. And lastly, attendees are in listen-only mode, but please submit any questions into the Q & A section as we go.

Today’s an unscripted discussion, so if there is time left at the end, we will address some of those. And if there’s not, we will submit them to our panelists and get you an answer via email after the session.

00:01:06

Stephanie: So, with that, I’d like to introduce today’s panel. First, joining us from Bluewave, we have Solutions Advisor, Martin Gale. Next is Deepak Ahuja, CTO of OneMind Services. And joining us from TierPoint is VP and Channel Chief Isaiah Hogberg. Thank you all for being here today.

Everybody’s gonna really benefit from all your expertise. And I will be your moderator along the way. My name is Stephanie Hamrick, and I’m the Director of Demand Gen at Bluewave.

00:01:37

Stephanie: So next, we’ll do just a brief round of introductions for those who may not know our organizations, and then we’ll get right into it. So first about Bluewave, we are a technology advisory that aims to bring confidence and clarity to technology decisions for our clients by partnering alongside IT leaders. We have expertise across a wide variety of technology areas from security to CX to cloud and a whole host of other things with both clients and advisors across the United States.

00:02:10

Stephanie: And I’ll hand it briefly over to Deepak to give us a short intro for OneMind Services.

00:02:16

Deepak: Thank you. Thank you for having me here. My name is Deepak, and I’m the founder and CTO at OneMind Services. We focus on helping customers navigate through what comes after VMware.

So, you know, let’s talk a little bit more about it as we go along. We have been in business for the last ten years. We are a powerful scale CSP and IMST, and we look forward to serving you.

00:02:40

Stephanie: Awesome. Thanks, Deepak. And then I’ll hand it over to Isaiah to give us a quick primer on TierPoint.

00:02:47

Isaiah: Thanks, Stephanie. Hello, everyone. Isaiah Hogberg with TierPoint.

We’re a data center and managed services provider, have done over ten thousand VMware migrations alone, have over forty data centers around the US, and expertise around multiple different cloud platforms. We lead with advisory and consulting and then, you know, layer that in with a variety of services from, you know, full stack solutions across multiple cloud platforms, security services, and applications as you see, and we are one of the few VMware Pinnacle partners still on the program and doing a lot of business with VMware, as well as other platforms.

00:03:33

Stephanie: Awesome. Thank you very much.

Alright. So, let’s get to our agenda. Today, we have three sections that we’re going to cover.

First, what’s the difference now from a year ago when the news about these VMware changes first dropped? Then we’re gonna talk about some real-world scenarios for how organizations are thinking about and handling their paths forward.

And lastly, we’ll do a lightning round for anybody who’s got a renewal coming up very shortly. What’s one takeaway, one thing you need to know before you leave today?

So, let’s get started with our first section, where we’re gonna discuss what has changed since the initial VMware shift. And I’m gonna preface this for everybody by saying we’re not gonna rehash the announcement from Broadcom a year ago. We’re gonna focus on what’s new now in 2026, how the situation is evolving. And I’m actually going to take down our slides here so we can focus on the conversation. And my first question for our panelists here is what is meaningfully different today, again, versus a year ago when this announcement first dropped?

I’ll go ahead and hand it over to you, Isaiah, to start.

00:04:49

Isaiah: Perfect. So it’s actually surprising how much has changed and if I would have thought and maybe you asked me a year ago, because there have been so many changes in the program that I would think it might have stabilized a little bit, but there’s been a few key things.

One, how licenses are able to be procured from VMware on the hyperscalers has changed. There’s been a massive another round of partner cuts of other cloud service providers, about four hundred in the US, that are no longer in the program That hasn’t been fully communicated to a lot of those clients yet, so that’s a that’s a big one. But probably the biggest is VCF9, VMware Cloud Foundation 9 has went from coming soon to fully out live in production and that’s really relevant to anyone that is, you know, making decisions over the last year of what, you know, they’re looking at their renewal and really needs to be front and center for anyone looking at that next step now that’s on VMware and how do they transition to VCF9 going forward.

Deepak, anything to add?

00:05:58

Deepak: Absolutely. So, you know, a year ago, market was reacting to, you know, what Broadcom is doing. Now, as you know, Isaiah said, it’s now fully in production.

Now, the key difference is VCF9 is not just an upgrade. It’s a re-platform, it’s a full stack like any other cloud that has existed in the past. So, you know, from a customer perspective, they are at a standstill or at a decision point that what’s next for us, whether to re-platform or choose an alternate.

00:06:36

Isaiah: To that point, because I think that’s really, really important and you can’t emphasize that enough is there will be a change regardless. So it is not like past VMware upgrades, it is a new platform.

And if you think about the journey that Broadcom and VMware have been on over the past couple of years, I think it’s really all been leading to this. And there’s certainly when we’re talking with clients, we see some that are frustrated understandably about some of what’s happened over the last couple of years. But there is actually a lot of good that is in the new platform as well.

And if you think about the experience that customers have had on public clouds, there’s a lot of the services libraries, the integrations out of the boxes, all of those pieces and really that that look and feel of what they’ve experienced on public cloud, a lot of that’s now built into the new VCF version 9 of VMware.

That’s where we’re working a lot with those clients of what does that enable from an innovation standpoint? How does that compare to other platforms to help them reevaluate that roadmap as well?

00:07:55

Martin: What I’m seeing in the field too is when Broadcom first made a lot of the changes from the perpetual licensing to the subscription base, there were two line items.

The VVF, was the lower priced one, which was a bundle of vSAN and ESXI and vCenter. And then there was the large one, VCF. And so what I’m hearing now is that only VCF is being offered, which is the higher price component and only for longer term contracts of five years. And I’m running into a lot of clients now that maybe they did renew for one year when the when when the subscriptions came out or two years, but those are coming to a close either right now or very soon thereafter. And so they feel like they’re running out of runway to make a decision. And I feel like they are telling me that I’d like to know what my options are.

00:09:00

Deepak: That, to that point, you know, to what Martin and Isaiah said, do keep in mind that, you know, one year later, we’re, you know, looking into a much more deeper commitment and lock in with VMware at this point in time.

00:09:18

Stephanie: And I think that makes a really great segue to our next question because we have seen customers, organizations say, you know, we tried to buy ourselves some runway. We feel like we’re running out of time. And the benefit of acting right now is that the market is a lot more mature than when these changes were announced a year ago. There are a lot more options that are viable that weren’t even being considered back then. So that brings us, quite nicely to our next question for all of our panelists. What options are now viable that weren’t before, and, you know, where are we really seeing organizations lean into these alternatives? This one, I’ll hand over to you, Deepak, first.

00:10:01

Deepak: Thank you. So looking at, you know, the perspective one year later in the migrations that we have done in, you know, the past year, a lot of customers are leaning into KVM-based architecture, either on-prem or in the cloud, right? When I say KVM-based architecture, there are, you know, a bunch of solutions available which are based on OpenStack, like Platform9, Fedora, which are a more mature platform, you know, adopted by, you know, some of the largest corporations like Moody’s, CERN, Deloitte, and so on and so forth. Also, we are seeing, you know, a paradigm shift for, you know, onesie-twosie servers to Proxmox and, you know, OpenNebula kind of solution. Proxmox is a little bit more mature than OpenNebula, but that’s what we are seeing. But the key difference here is, as you know, we have been talking about the runway, why the runway is running out.

First, from the customer perspective, they have to get a hardware refresh in most of the cases.

Know, licensing running out, they’re not sure which way or which direction to go, and that that’s where, you know, the alternates are coming and playing nicer in the market and showing their maturity that what other options customer has at a very lower cost.

00:11:22

Stephanie: What about you, Isaiah?

00:11:26

Isaiah: There’s a couple of key pieces of what’s evolving and what is new. First, I’ll say there’s a lot more certainty around those options now. And if we continue on the VCF9 piece, new version of VMware, since that’s out, we have a lot of customers, we’ve already transitioned that are running on the platform, We a lot we’ve had the new even AI capabilities in lab for quite a while. So we can provide a lot of assurity to clients of what will that look like, what does it take, what are the options for hardware to take the guesswork out of that?

And one of the key pieces as well is the third-party integrations that most clients are using historically within their platform. And there’s been a lot of questions around, will those continue to be supported? How are they supported? Things like Zerto and other DR as a Service solutions that have lost kernel access.

So now there’s this really of how they integrate, what those look like, but then really importantly when it comes back to making the decision around do I continue to use other third parties or use VMware native tooling like VMware Live Recovery, there’s been a lot of improvements in the native aspects, which are are of course bundled in with v with VMware now. And a lot of the work that we’re doing with clients is outlining those options, pros and cons both from a technical standpoint, price standpoint, functionality, and help them build that roadmap to make that decision of where to go.

It’s actually now is a much easier time from some of those regards than it was a year ago because there’s a lot more of those questions answered and we’ve done that with multiple dozens and dozens of clients over this last year.

00:13:24

Martin: I think there’s probably, if I had to generalize three themes that I hear about from the clients that I talk to about. Number One is the hardware. You’d mentioned with, the deployment of VCF9, there are some pretty strict, hardware requirements based on the new HCL that came out, right?

Many of the clients that I talked to maybe just refreshed a year and a half ago, two years ago, and they would like to get some more life. So that’s one of the things that they would like to address. And I think that leads them down the path of maybe going to a KVM architecture or something that can maybe give them a little bit of life left on that. Number two is the integrations, exactly what Isaiah said, and the support that goes along with that.

That has been something that I think in the industry around open source alternatives has been an issue, is where can I get support if I’m going to go to a KVM architecture? So again, we’re seeing organizations like OneMind Services that can now take on that support and give that buffer to the client so they can feel more comfortable about making that decision on going with something that they’ve been comfortable with for the last twenty years. And the third thing, and I think that this thing never goes out of style, regardless of what happens in the industry, and that’s cost optimization is like, now I have an uptick.

I think the largest uptick I’ve seen that a customer wasn’t expecting was 13x. I think we generally tell people to expect more than 2x and maybe as much as 10x, but that’s generally we see somewhere in between the two and the ten. And if they’re on a path of cost optimization, one of the benefits of some of the alternative architectures is they are a lower cost option, right?

It’s not going to be free if you’re going to have support and you’re going to have some managed services. You may have to change your backup platform. You may have to change your replication and disaster recovery platform, but you’ll be in a good place with a supported platform. So we’re seeing a very nice maturation in the industry across the board because of what’s happening with VMware.

00:15:36

Deepak: Absolutely. And to Martin’s point, right, you know, as I initially said, it’s more re-platforming. Even with VCF9, you might have to change your backup and recovery platform. As Isaiah mentioned, Zerto cannot even access the kernel. So, there is a change coming anyway, right? Whichever direction you may decide, but there is a significant change and a good opportunity for customers and providers to step up their game.

00:16:06

Stephanie: And I think that also makes a nice segue to our next question here, the last question of this section. Where are people overestimating or underestimating complexity? I’m going to hand this one right back to you, Deepak, because I think you’re already kind of talking about this here. There’s a change anyways. Are people maybe underestimating the complexity of moving forward? Are they overestimating it? What do you think?

00:16:32

Deepak: I think they are. When we talk to the customers or partners, I think, one, this is a common theme, right? They’re overestimating the complexity of alternate solution. It’s not a rocket science. It has been around for twenty five years. It works for some of the largest corporations with the right support and right execution. There is no reason to overestimate the complexity.

What people are underestimating is how Broadcom is going to define the next wave of VMware, right? And what we have learned from VCF8 to VCF9, it has done nothing but created chaos.

You know, if you have to re-platform, here is the time you have the strategy, you have the right partners, and we just need to put together an execution strategy. And, you know, when we are working with customer and to put their mind at ease, We lead with the POCs in their brownfield, in the greenfield, how is this gonna look like, what does the migration look like, how many VMs you can migrate per day, what would be the impact, and the entire analysis that goes alongside it. Again, this is no rocket science. It’s as easy of a button as you can imagine in today’s date with all AI and automation available.

00:17:55

Stephanie: What do think Isaiah?

00:17:57

Isaiah: So, I agree with the analogy where Deepak started of both this underestimating and overestimating. And, you know, one of the areas that it is easy, even though the new versions of VMware maybe aren’t familiar to everyone yet, I know a lot of customers had probably been running it in their own labs as well.

It’s been out for a little while now, we can certainly bring a surety around that. So that’s an area we’re answering questions every day for clients on what does that look like, what would the cost be, what would the changes be. So that’s easy to get answers around.

The piece where we’re seeing clients surprised and caught off guard right now is when they go out for that hardware refresh. If they haven’t done that in a little while, this could be a really big surprise and frankly a shock right now. Most people have probably heard of some of the chip shortages and what’s that happening and maybe heard about how that’s affecting prices. But we’re seeing it every day even from the biggest equipment manufacturers, prices have gone up. They’re continuing to go up and timelines are being pushed out.

One of the biggest pieces is start as early as you can because we’re seeing 30 – 80 percent increase in the hardware cost, in timelines, pushing out a couple of months as well for clients.

We’re trying to plan very far ahead for clients to make sure that the resource are there for them.

We’re seeing a lot of clients reaching out where they’ve been told that they can’t get it in time and we’re coming up with creative solutions for them. There is creative solutions around it that even we’re doing a lot of backups and DR into hyperscalers or easy solutions at VMware on Microsoft Azure or AWS as well. So there’s lots of solutions out there, but certainly get ahead of that as much as you can.

00:20:07

Martin: Yeah, I think from a client’s perspective, what I run into is many of the IT professionals, like what I did for most of my career, want to do everything themselves.

And they have to understand that we’ve said it many times on this call, right? It’s a complete platform change. And as an organization, you might do this once or twice in your entire life cycle of hypervisors, whereas organizations like TierPoint and OneMind Services, they do this on a daily basis. So I think part of what I do as a Bluewave solution advisor is encourage them to lean in and get the engineering support from folks like these guys that do this on a daily basis.

They’ve been there and they have done this many times and they have a lot of the answers and they can speed up your decision process. And if you’ve put yourself in a position that maybe you weren’t really trying to, but you are feeling panicky because you’re running out of runway, I think one of the biggest issues you cause yourself is you get in a position where I just don’t want to do anything so I’m going to pay for that. And maybe that’s not what I want to do. If that’s what you want to do, that’s fine.

But then again, put yourself in a position to fully leverage the VCF9 and you might need a partner like TierPoint who are experts in VCF9 that can get you where you want to go.

00:21:41

Stephaine: Awesome. From here, we’re gonna go ahead and move on to our second section. So I’ll pull up our heading here, real world scenarios. So for our panelists, without naming names, we are each gonna go through some recent customer scenarios that highlight how organizations are thinking about and dealing with trade-offs. This one I’ll hand over to Isaiah first.

00:22:09

Isaiah: So a customer comes to mind, who, this is a common scenario, reached out to us. They were about four months away from their renewal date. They had just gotten the quote of what the VMware pricing would be for that next upgrade. They were on running VMware at a lot of their different sites, so on their on their premise is across all of their locations, we’re on multiple different versions, hardware was at various stages, very common scenario we see.

It somewhat seemed like they didn’t have time to be able to execute on a strategy of change even though they wanted to.

This is where we’re able to get creative. One of the things we can do as a VMware Broadcom partner, we were able to do a creative solution to provide licensing support on their existing hardware.

We and to do that off of our pool of licenses that we have, which was able to buy them time. So we’re able to do that, support that for a year, we could bring that in if we need to, but put that solution in place while we work on an overarching strategy together with them. So that phase two of that was, of course, come in, do assessments, look at all of the hardware, look at the applications, start to categorize the applications based upon their goals. Some they knew they wanted to move up to Azure, others they wanted to keep on prem environments, others they wanted to move to a hosted VCF9 solution.

So we built out a full strategy with them and are now working on executing on a transition plan over the course of twelve months instead of needing to do that all within a four-month window for them. So, we gave them the breathing room to be able to build that full roadmap and solid strategy that reduced risk to the organization both on pricing pressures and on, you know, of IT of making a quick decision unnecessarily.

00:24:28

Stephanie: What about on the OneMind side, Deepak?

00:24:31

Deepak: Sure. You know, I would like to call out two short use cases. And, you know, I agree with Isaiah, but the people with short rope, you know, how do they go about it, right? And any kind of long-term strategy here requires time. So what do you need if you have six or eight weeks or four months left on your contract, right? So one of the use cases, this is a retail, large retail customer under a huge VMware renewal pressure. They have a mix of the hardware, but about 95 percent of their hardware is still viable.

You know, what we did with them is we started off with a POC for three weeks. When we kicked off the POC, we did an execution planning and how things would look like. We guaranteed a successful migration alongside our POC and customer was able to see this first team, look at the interface and the ease of use and comparative to, I would say three VCF9 architecture, which is very close to VMware. We saved them about 60 percent of the cost, migrated most of their workloads before the timeline was even close, and gave them time to migrate some of their legacy application which were still on VMware and where we were able to help them as a partner to replatform those applications.

Now, if I look at this, reuse what you already own before you buy more. The cost of VMware licensing has gone several folds up. The cost of buying new hardware, at least six to seven x what it used to be. We are a cloud service provider, we are dealing with this on daily basis.

I think one more use case that comes to mind, where we define a scale and a speed, we had a healthcare customer in a pinch with eight weeks’ rope in their hand, you know, reusing the hardware was not a viable option. They had seventeen different locations worldwide, and they needed to be migrated. We migrated over twenty thousand VMs in a matter of four weeks. At a lightning speed, we did the evaluation during the POC, we put the strategy together during the POC, and did a successful migration.

This is one of our largest use case story from migration from VMware to a KVM based architecture, you know, at scale, this is not a technology problem, it’s an execution problem. A lot of times, even with larger organization, and you can imagine the scale of an organization with twenty thousand VMs, it’s large scale. There’s a lot of planning required. There’s a lot of strategy required.

And imagine the cost they would have incurred renewing their VMware licenses. We cut their costs by about 48 percent overall, even by putting them in our cloud and their experience could not be better. They are thrilled and they like working with us. I’ll stop at that.

00:27:43

Martin: Yeah, if might chime in just for the last minute or two, and I’d like to talk about two different engagements that I was in, one with each of these two companies, right? So one of them, the customer, had a strategy they would like to have a hybrid scenario. So they wanted some of their infrastructure in Azure and some of it not, right? And Isaiah’s company was able to bring them a significant amount of map funding to help them with not just doing the migration but also doing there there’s a part of that when you’re moving from a virtual machine platform to a resource platform that you you have to do some interrogation.

You have to find out and there there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to move say a virtual machine to a container. So they were able to get six figures worth of funding to help that customer so it would help jump start their entire migration and then their final outcome that they wanted to get to with some money that they didn’t have on the table. So I thought that was very, very creative and helped that customer achieve what they were looking for.

Another one, and again, this one is not the norm, I did with OneMind Services, right? But we had a customer that was under extreme cost optimization pressure from their C staff.

And we were able to reuse their hardware and actually drive the cost of what it would cost them for new hardware and their VMware licenses. And this, again, not the norm, but we got two thirds the price off of. So that’s a significant cost drop.

Generally, we don’t lead or say that that’s what we can do, but that was a very extreme case. So nice job, Deepak, for your team on that one.

00:29:40

Deepak: It’s a common saying, at OneMind. Fire your cloud, not your employees.

00:29:47

Stephanie: I really like that. Alright.

So here, what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna transition to our last section here, which is going to be lightning round because we’re coming up on our thirty to forty minute mark that we are aiming for. So I’m gonna ask each of you on our panel, and we’re gonna try and hit it in thirty seconds or less.

If someone is heading into a renewal in the next six to eight months, what is one thing they shouldn’t overlook, one key takeaway for them? And this one, I’ll hand over to Deepak. I’ll hand it to you first.

00:30:21

Deepak: I think they should not overlook the cost in using the partners.

00:30:28

Stephaine: Nice, short, sweet. I like it. Isaiah, what about you?

00:30:32

Isaiah: So, while they’re might start the process looking at how do they transition, how do they move from something there, I would say make sure and don’t lose sight of the opportunity to innovate.

Because no matter whatever platform they’re looking at, there should be room to innovate, to improve, to help make their roadmap a better place over the next one to two to three years.

And there’s time to make sure you accomplish that as well. We’re doing it day in, day out for clients to not only solve for the short term, but make sure we can look at what is that path to full modernization to take advantage of modern tools, to bring them to not just a new place and a new state, but a better one over the next couple of years.

00:31:26

Awesome. And Martin, I’ll let you have the last word.

00:31:29

Martin: Okay. Well, think the best advice that I could give my fellow professionals is don’t be afraid to ask for help. Even if you feel like you’re running out of runway and you’re in a bit of a crisis mode, you can turn that crisis into a transformational opportunity if you bring in the right people. And remember, you’re only doing this once. These folks do it on a daily basis and they do it for a living. And they are more than willing to lean in and give you the engineering help that you need.

00:32:01

Stephanie: Awesome. Thank you all. So I will wrap this up here with just a few thoughts. So first, if you are staring down an upcoming renewal and you don’t have a plan, it’s never too late to call in backup.

As we heard, we have been able to, in the market across many different providers, find creative ways to solve the problem that you’re facing if your problem feels like you don’t have enough runway and you are just getting pushed into a renewal you don’t want to do. So at Bluewave, we can help you identify what you have, what it would cost to stay with VMware, what it would take to move, and how any of those options help you achieve your larger business goals. And then we can connect you with top tier partners like TierPoint and OneMind Services who can help you get there. And of course, we don’t stop there.

If your goals are increased modernization, like we just heard, preparing your architecture for AI, things like that, as we mentioned, we do have cloud optimization assessments as well.

00:33:05

Stephanie: So with that, I will say thank you to everybody for joining us today. We are at that thirty-minute mark. So if you had any questions in the Q&A, I will submit them to our panelists after the session, and then we will get back to you via email. We have a QR code on the screen that you can scan if you want to see more sources about VMware.

And if you’re a skeptical person who doesn’t like to scan random QR codes, I put the link down there as well. You can go there and find that information. After this session, we’ll be sending out an email with that link. So if you don’t wanna do either, you’re still gonna get the link. It will also include a link to the recording for today.

And with that, I will give one last thank you to our audience and also a thank you to all of our panelists here, Martin, Isaiah, Deepak, for hopping on with us and sharing all of your knowledge. We hope that everybody in the audience learned something new and we hope to see you all on our next one. Thank you everybody and I’ll say goodbye.