ClearScale and Matilda Cloud are partnering to offer new VMware migration services to enterprise customers seeking alternatives since Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of VMware.
Under a deal announced recently, ClearScale, an MSP and AWS Premier Consulting Partner, is now working with Matilda Cloud and its comprehensive suite of migration tools to help customers move their VMware-based workloads to AWS. Such migrations have been becoming more popular since Broadcom angered a vocal group of VMware customers with unpopular program and pricing changes following its VMware acquisition.
As more VMware customers reassess their existing contracts post-Broadcom acquisition, competing vendors are responding by offering less expensive and less restrictive flexible accommodations for those customers' business-critical VMware deployments.
Under the ClearScale partnership with Matilda Cloud, the two companies offer VMware migration assessments and streamlined migration paths for customers.
How the Partnership Will Help Customers
Jimmy Chui, the CEO of ClearScale, told ChannelE2E that the partnership aims to help existing VMware customers decide what to do if they choose to migrate their deployments.
“This will help our customers to gain advantages like cost optimization by utilizing pay-per-use models, increased scalability to meet fluctuating demand, and improved agility,” said Chui. “It will also provide enhanced flexibility to access resources from anywhere, and potentially simplified management through cloud-based tools.”
For customers, the resulting migration consulting and services will give them better data to help guide their decisions about what to do, said Chui. “In short, faster time to value, the ability to focus on business outcomes, and moving beyond lift and shift.”
Chui said that the partnership came about after the companies began hearing from enterprises that were seeking help with the situation.
“[They] needed a rapid understanding of how to move and offset the costs of licensing and assessment and transact via AWS Marketplace,” said Chui.
‘The Demand to Move Away from VMware is Enormous:’ Analyst
Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal research analyst of ZK Research, told ChannelE2E that many VMware customers have not been happy with Broadcom’s changes.
“The demand to move away from VMware is enormous,” said Kerravala. “All the price tags and things that Broadcom [has set up since the acquisition] has left customers with a decision – they can either upgrade to the full-blown VMware Cloud Foundation – which for a lot of customers is the right decision – or they can migrate off VMware Cloud. But the problem with migrating off is that it is not an easy task.”
Based on discussions with some VMware customers, Kerravala said they face a conundrum. “Some have told me that the complexity of moving away is more expensive than just paying the extra ‘ransom’ fee that Broadcom is demanding.”
For companies like ClearScale and Matilda, “there is no shortage of demand for MSPs to be able to do this work,” he said. “Any kind of hiccup there could have a pretty negative impact on a business. So, I did like that they tried to make it as turnkey as possible. That is important for customers.”
And for enterprises that are “really hardcore do-it-yourself shops, they may likely go to an MSP for help to at least get through the migration because VMware got increasingly complex and broader over the years,” he added. “There are a lot of companies whose entire dataset of processes are built around VMware.”
Another VMware customer who spoke with Kerravala before the acquisition was quite clear on the topic, the analyst said. “I asked the CIO what it would be like if he had to move away from VMware. He looked up in the air and said he did not even know how he would start that process.”
“More and more VMware customers are looking for an alternative,” said Kerravala. The Broadcom changes “created this big wave of companies looking to move off now. But from a VMware or Broadcom perspective, a lot of that was just collateral damage right there. Instead, they are focused on the biggest and most profitable customers and everybody else can go as far as I can tell.”
Kerravala said that a strength of the partnership is that AWS “is as trusted a partner as there is,” which can be reassuring to customers who need to make these kinds of decisions. “And even if it costs a bit more to do this than what a company is planning to spend, it is the predictability that is important here, and to be able to develop some outcomes around that so they know what to expect and when to expect it. Because without that, it is a bit of a Wild West. And there is nothing that spooks an IT leader more than uncertainty.”
