HPE’s new promotion aims to entice customers to more deeply consider migrating away from VMware. Although numerous third parties surveys have pointed to a significant amount of VMware customers looking for reduce or eliminate your use of VMware in the coming years, concerns about time and cost They are also expected to slow or deter migration plans, especially since migration may require paying for two virtualization products simultaneously.
“One of the biggest things we see is that as customers go down this path to transform their operating model, they end up with double spending,” HPE executive vice president and chief technology officer Fidelma Russo said, according to The Registry.
Dean Colpitts, CTO of IT Group (MITG), a member of the Canadian managed services provider (MSP), which VMware removed from its reseller program After a 19-year partnership a year ago, he doesn’t expect the promotion to boost sales much.
“All of our customers work on three-, four-, or five-year life cycles and typically build that purchase into their initial purchase,” he told Ars. “The biggest issue I’m seeing right now that is impacting sales and adoption of VM Essentials is that high prices and DRAM limitations are impacting customers’ ability to get new hardware to migrate to.”
Colpitts noted a lack of hardware available for permanent migrations and “to temporarily facilitate a legacy reimage of existing VMware customer equipment to” VM Essentials.
On the other hand, one of HPE’s largest channel partners, San Diego-based Nth Generation, expects its “VM Essentials sales channel to quadruple and sales to grow at approximately that rate” due to HPE’s promotion. CRN reported.
“These additional free licensing and migration capabilities will dramatically reduce the risk of moving to VM Essentials,” Nth Generation co-president and CTO Dan Molina told the publication.
Partner promotion
HPE also announced that it would grant 600 reseller partners who obtain the HPE Partner Program Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by the end of the year free VM Essentials software licenses for three years. However, partners still have to pay support costs.
Colpitts said the benefit is “a step in the right direction,” but that limiting the promotion to 600 members is “very shortsighted.” He believes HPE should offer all its partners VM Essentials “to make it easier to introduce (VM Essentials) to customer sites and displace competitors.”
“They need to launch (VM Essentials) as far and as fast as they (can) to immediately gain traction and attract ISVs, which will further increase adoption,” he said.
