Looking at alternatives to VMware by Broadcom ?

It has been some time since the VMware acquisition by Broadcom. The subject is now getting less emotional and more fact-based. Strategies to act for benefiting from the new model (new subscription-based licensing, product bundling), or to alleviate its impact, or even to get out on longer term, are building and shaping.

We, Kyndryl, have been assisting our customers on maturing possible directions and associated transformation already on a significant number of cases.

In light of our Consult experience accumulated so far with some of our customers through impact analysis and risk mitigation studies, here are some principles and advice on how to look more clearly at things and on first steps to act, which I gathered and would like to share. A part was also shared at the round table event "Le futur de la Virtualisation" organized by Alliancy, and their special issue we contributed to with Yvon DUBOC and Daniel Garcia

View larger than just virtualization and the hypervisor layer

You also need to look at the upper layers of provisioning and deployment automation, to get a bigger lever and a better business case for a clear transformation.

• Account for future plans on this larger domain. Indeed, any transformation, especially on the the hypervisor level (key to operations stability and robustness), is going to take time, and by then, your Platform provisioning and deployment automation strategy will be in the middle.

• Enter into this as an opportunity to elevate away from the low levels of infrastructure details / IaaS / Infra-as-Code. Accelerate on Platform / PaaS / Platform-as-Code in order to provision and to deploy “Production-ready” workloads quickly, with robustness, and with flexible and agile composition capabilities = Cloud Management Platform (CMP), Internal Developer Platform (IDP), cloud native layers.
• Develop on how your IT can better align and serve applications and your Business. Introduce or connect with your Enterprise Architecture to disentangle your IT forces from low value bits and bytes, from cabling and Infrastructure, switch faster to Platform level Dev(Sec)Ops?/ Ops2Dev automation, and consequently contribute more on application level Business value in direct support of your Business Units.

There is no silver bullet answer, this is unique to each

• Existing investments in hardware, services/cloud, software, and their trajectory, as well as values and strategical directions specific to your company have a direct influence on the next steps which make sense, and on benefits from each option and roadmaps to consider.

• 3 main axis's of action can be identified : 1) optimize, 2) transform to another solution and 3) modernize applications. The last one is the most complex one, and the longest one to act upon, but is also a very good way to get rid of the virtualization problem. A mix of the 3 will be a good answer, and the right mix will depend on each one's situation.

• High diversity and complexity is coming in as soon as you consider alternatives, with an explosion of possible options : Nutanix, KVM and all its derivatives like Oracle VM or RedHat Openshift Virtualization (and there are plenty others), Azure Stack HCI, Xen, Proxmox, XCP-ng, OpenNebula, OpenStack/CloudStack, MorpheusData, Cycloid ... factor in NSX alternatives such as Open vSwitch, Cisco ACI .. and add to that all the Public Cloud alternatives .. to only name a few ! The panel is large, and the many views and diverse actors with different trends or innovation tracks inside your company, who are impacted, have already started or have different interests and are weighting into different directions, are as many factors to account for when building the answer.

Reach for help, co-construct options, roadmaps and impacts

The large panel that is opening after the question "what else" is making things quite difficult to converge, and can be a significant slow down factor while time is ticking, even when your existing VMware ELA is secured for some time.

2026 or 2027 is like the day-after-next when looking at all actions to transform on such an area, and there is a need to secure a direction now to be able to act in time before then.

• Explore options, fit for company values, trends, existing investments.
• Select a few, converge the many actors inside your company on these, get them onboard and contributing.
• Analyze impacts, create first designs, prototype, explore implementation strategies, look at how to transform and operate the new mode (Target Operating Model).
• Introduce a vision, communicate on it, explain it, sell it internally, get adhesion, build executive summaries .. both on short and long term, with business cases (2 years minimum).

• Change is long to make happen, including rebuilding skills.?

• Transformation / migration is costly, there needs to be a benefit identified behind, which is not just based on increased risks associated to Broadcom's directions and to its brand / portfolio evolution strategies.

• Open Source is an investment to build in itself, hard to acquire skills, even harder to keep up with its rhythm, where there is high volatility & evolution in technologies (like a big shift every +/- 2 years), and strong opinions or rejections to marry between proponents and followers inside the company.
• Note: contrary to simplistic views which can float around, the true cost of Open source is often not cheap, either through heavy in-house investment or through partners providing packaged open source solutions or support for them. It can be long or difficult to estimate precisely, and it needs to be planned for.
• Optimize the existing while progressing, to buy time.
• Find reliable partners to accelerate.

Net is, there is a strong need to widen the case, to plan for time to elaborate, and for help and expertise to explore options, in order to converge and to construct an appropriate vision and roadmap, and then to get it into motion. A significant duration is to be expected when a move out is considered. While doing that, one may find out that staying with VMware remains cost competitive in some specific situations or for some time. So it is important to factually look at business cases, impacts, roadmaps, transformation costs of all options .. to keep reasoning in terms of benefits and to optimize the value of these IT investments.