Humans don’t like change. Whether it’s saying goodbye to your favorite pair of jeans, moving to a new house, or trying a new kind of coffee, we often resist change. But sometimes change is forced on us. For example: Over the past month or so, Broadcom rolled out tremendous changes to VMware licensing. This is why many of our customers and partners are wondering what the changes will mean to them. No matter where they are in their modernization journey, their reactions run the gamut: from shock and worry to some looking for the nearest exit.
Briefly, here is what has changed:
- You will no longer be able to buy perpetual VMware licenses.
- Broadcom terminated OEM agreements and plans to create new agreements with more OEMs moving forward.
- Any customer that wants to buy new VMware licenses will have to buy subscription-based licenses.
- Your current VMware support contract will eventually run out, and when that happens, they’ll want to talk about moving you to a subscription-based contract.
Experience matters.
These changes could mean unexpected increases in infrastructure costs for many of our customers and partners — in some cases, as much as 300%. This is why many are looking at alternatives. However, the prospect of overhauling and switching to a new hypervisor or virtualization platform can be daunting.
“This is not something the average customer was anticipating,” says Dante Orsini, chief strategy officer at 11:11 Systems. “This is why there is so much confusion right now as organizations try to figure it all out. The good news is that we can help.”
Orsini explained that Broadcom recently invited 11:11 Systems to join its top tier cloud services provider partner program, in recognition of our decades of experience in the cloud. This means that 11:11 is one of a select number of providers globally with access to volume discount pricing and dedicated, global support. Customers that want to leverage VMware Cloud Foundation — the enterprise-grade hybrid cloud solution — will feel at home with 11:11.
“Wherever you are in your digital transformation, you need advice navigating the new reality,” says Orsini. “We have deep knowledge about the best ways to execute your cloud strategy, whether that’s public, private, or hybrid. Our cloud expertise can be enormously helpful in figuring out how to optimize your costs or facilitate your cloud journey securely. We can help you get where you need to be.”
Should I stay or should I go?
The best news in this upheaval is that you don’t need to make decisions right away. Most experts recommend a methodical approach, so you choose the best options for your organization.
Again, this is another area where 11:11 provides invaluable help, because it isn’t just our longevity in cloud services that matters in this context. It’s also our experience guiding customers on their journey to the cloud.
11:11 Consulting Services and our extensive cloud experience can help here — whether you decide to stay put and adapt to VMware changes or migrate to a new hypervisor. Our goal through our Cloud Migration Services is to follow industry best practices to migrate customers with minimal disruption.
“You can have all the best intentions, but unless you have the right resources in place, you’re not going to have a good outcome,” explains Uday Kumar, principal consultant at 11:11 Systems. “Our approach looks at your entire infrastructure to recommend the best solutions for your specific business needs.”
11:11 Cloud Migration Services provides a robust program that includes these four phases:
- Discover: Determine your source and target environments
- Develop: Create a workload migration strategy
- Test: Organize a proof of concept for your migration strategy
- Migrate: Move your workloads
The migration strategy includes a network assessment, cost optimization, migration runbook, and advice from certified professionals.
“We also work to ensure overall performance of your IT environment is not affected following migration,” says Kumar. “You care about customer outcomes, so we do too. We want you and your customers to have a smooth, seamless transition.”
Options, options
Having options will be key moving forward, because many organizations may not be able to manage their technology stack locally, given the new licensing reality. This is why it will be important to consider solutions that provide the greatest flexibility and address network, security and cyber resilience, data protection/disaster recovery, as well as compliance.
No matter what strategy you choose, 11:11 also has cloud options to ensure your path forward is a success. Our flexibility can meet just about every business need: from self-service to fully managed, from 11:11 Private Cloud to Managed Cloud Services with hyperscale cloud providers such as AWS and Azure. Our experts make sure that when you migrate your on-premises applications to the cloud, or put together a hybrid cloud strategy, you’ll have the right cloud and services to meet all your security, cost, and performance needs.
In the coming months, 11:11 expects that many of you will be scaling up your multi-cloud, hybrid cloud strategies as the Broadcom changes are forcing many organizations to adapt. Which proves what Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, said more than 2500 years ago, “The only constant in life is change.”
