Pure Storage Weighs In On Next Steps For ‘Upset’ VMware Customers

Pure Storage is weighing in on how VMware customers are navigating the unexpected price increases and packaging changes following its acquisition by Broadcom.

“Customers are feeling a lot of uncertainty around their virtualization platform,” said Dan Kogan, VP of product management and marketing at Pure Storage. “They’re in tough spot right now. This isn’t an area 18 months ago, pre-Broadcom acquisition, most customers would have been thinking about. Generally speaking, customers were really happy with VMware. They were highly dependent on it. It was part of their hybrid cloud future. There was a lot of automation built around it. It really was at the core of their data center infrastructure.

Pure Storage's Dan Kogan

“Broadcom promptly started to change their both licensing model to do away with some products," Kogan added. "Also created larger bundles and started to push things that customers didn’t necessarily want or need in their licensing packages. "[The company] also increased prices significantly, which is what they do when you have a near monopoly position of the kind of VMware had.”

So now, he said, customers are faced with “some massive unplanned costs to renew something that’s critical to their business that they hadn’t planned to move away from.”

‘A Lot Of Emotion’ from VMware Customers

About 85% of Pure’s customer base uses VMware too, said Kogan.

“[Partners] are telling us is there’s a lot of emotion out there with customers right now. They’re, frankly, pretty upset to see the price increases that they’ve been seeing and are feeling pretty jammed. So they’re trying to counsel customers through that.”

Kogan outlined four options that VMware customers can now take. The first is to stay with VMware, which he said, in the short term, is what most customers will choose. The second is to migrate VMware workloads to the cloud — in this case, Kogan advocates for Microsoft Azure.

Pure is matching Microsoft Azure’s migration incentives, claiming a combination of both is “the only one that works at scale” for VMware customers moving to cloud.

“As Microsoft offered those migration incentives, we came on the back end doing the same thing. So, [we’re] offering a 20% discount on our side, and offering a migration add-on service through our partners,” said Kogan.

“It’s not the easy button exactly, but it’s probably the simplest workload to migrate at this point. And now there’s been an incentive created in the market to move that way. Now there’s a really compelling event in those increased costs and licensing changes to make a move.”

Kogan said some joint Pure and Microsoft partners report that Microsoft has been so overrun with demand, “their sales team is just throwing early-stage opportunities their way because they don’t have the cycles to prosecute those themselves. So the channel is seeing a ton of a ton of uplift from Microsoft directly here too.”

Partners Helping Customers Get the Best Deal on Renewals

The third option that Kogan outlined is to switch virtualization providers, and the last is to modernize their VMs with Kubevirt. However, these are mostly aspirational for many VMware customers.

“[It] gives them a little bit of payback to stick it to VMware for their price increases by moving to Nutanix or a Hyper V or something like that. Those are hard to pull off in the short term for a variety of reasons.”

As such, Kogan said partners are counselling VMware customers: “You can make an emotional decision, and you can say goodbye to VMware and not sign at the renewal. And we can help you migrate off to something else. But it’s going to be expensive and it’s going to take a while. So, while you are not giving VMware the satisfaction of collecting your money, you are going to pay just as much or even more to somebody else. Both in the short term and potentially the long term, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face if you’re making a knee-jerk reaction.

“So it really ends up being a very consultative approach of, ‘Let’s look at how much you’re depending on some core VMware features … can you move off of VMware?' Because if you are really leveraging their full software suite and a lot of their automation capabilities that are more mature than some of the other hypervisors, you’re going to have to do a lot of rework. Preparing your infrastructure environment and your administration teams to handle whatever you move over to. [And] the cost of migration itself is going to be reasonably high," he said.

As such, more partners are helping VMware customers get the best deal on their renewals in the short term.

“Let’s figure out how we keep your environment up and running in the least disruptive way to your business. And then let’s figure out where it is you want to go long term," Kogan said.