VMware Customers Say Bye-bye Broadcom And Vote For Nutanix

Sponsored feature Where do we go from here? That's the question many businesses have been asking in the wake of Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and the changes in pricing and services that follow.

Those who have turned to Nutanix are discovering that it's not merely a substitute but an alternative that opens up new possibilities. That's because Nutanix offers not just technical capability, but a commitment to innovation and strategic partnerships.

With Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, organizations that have relied on the virtual machine management suite in the past are now concerned about the future. They face urgent questions, including how much they may have to pay following Broadcom's licensing changes. Their second concern is that they might miss out on the benefits of innovation.

Time for a change

Many VMware customers are no longer just thinking about whether to consider an alternative. Now, it's clear to them that a shift is imperative. They must choose a different infrastructure option to support their business.

There's a silver lining to this situation: businesses now have an opportunity to upgrade their infrastructure platform to something that can evolve with changing business requirements. Instead of merely replacing VMware, they can deploy a future-ready platform that not only supports traditional VM-based applications but also enables AI and cloud native development.

Nutanix's unified cloud platform supports both virtual machines and containers. It provides a consistent experience across edge, datacenter, and public clouds, enabling organizations to modernize their infrastructure for efficiency and growth while maintaining enterprise-level security and resiliency.

Two types of Nutanix migration

Customers swapping out the VMware ecosystem in favor of Nutanix generally fall into two categories, according to Lee Caswell, the company's SVP product and solutions marketing. He calls the first modernizers, and the second gradualists.

Modernizers will revamp their infrastructure to capitalize on containerized modern applications and AI capabilities. Many customers in this category are innovation centers within larger businesses and organizations chartered with driving new initiatives.

Some larger customers are adopting new systems because of Nutanix's dual support for virtual machines and containers across hybrid multicloud infrastructure at enterprise scale.

Smaller businesses can also fit in this category, where they can swap out their entire infrastructure because they have less exposure to investment in legacy infrastructure.

Gradualists take a more incremental approach, allowing them to nurse substantial existing investments that they still want to use. Nutanix serves these customers by partnering with companies that support a more gradual transition to modern capabilities including AI, using the same infrastructure and enterprise experience they have with business-critical workloads like databases.

For example, Nutanix has forged partnerships with Dell and Pure Storage to support external storage. When Nutanix releases its support for Pure Storage as external storage, expected later this year,  Pure Storage's 13,500 customers will have an opportunity to migrate off VMware and enjoy Nutanix pricing, support, and customer experience advantages without having to overhaul all their hardware. Nutanix also prepares these customers for entry into the fast-changing world of AI through partnerships with NVIDIA and Hugging Face.

Equipped for an AI future

Business integrations with large language models (LLMs) are well on their way to becoming the norm rather than the exception. Nutanix's customers will be ready for whatever emerges, thanks to the partnership with the key players in this space.

Building on strong customer interest in the Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution, Nutanix has introduced GPT-in-a-Box 2.0. The new version offers expanded support for NVIDIA's GPUs and inference-focused NIM microservices, plus a streamlined interface for managing agentic AI models and inference endpoints.

Thanks to the Nutanix partnership with Hugging Face, GPT-in-a-Box 2.0 users can access and deploy validated LLMs from the Hugging Face Hub. This allows users to run pre-trained LLMs with full support from Nutanix in a streamlined, end-to-end workflow. It helps enterprises accelerate GenAI adoption while maintaining control over their data and infrastructure.

As Caswell notes, "We have done the prerequisite sizing work to make sure that the models will work with the infrastructure in a resilient way while also introducing something very important for AI: data sovereignty."

To give customers more choice, Nutanix supports a wide range of AI-optimized GPUs from NVIDIA, including the L40S, H100, and L4. It also supports systems from Dell, HPE, and Lenovo. The idea is to give enterprises a flexible, secure, and scalable way to deploy GenAI in their own environments and to make their own choices.

Customer-centric choices

Nutanix's competitive strategy centers on putting the power of choice in the hands of its customers. Such flexibility is not to be found among competitors, who tend to favor restrictive vendor lock-ins. Broadcom maintains a VM-required approach, mandating vSphere as the hypervisor component regardless of deployment location, whether in cloud, edge, or on-premises environments. Similarly, Red Hat requires a container environment across all implementations. These restrict customers to a single deployment model regardless of their organizational needs and capabilities.

In contrast, Nutanix offers genuine choice across multiple dimensions. Customers gain deployment flexibility through cloud   native, bare metal, or hypervisor options, hardware choices including servers to own or rent, support for running in various cloud   native environments, GPU and LLM options for AI/ML infrastructure, and the ability for customers to choose which Nutanix software components to purchase.

"Run anything anywhere" is the vision Nutanix showcased at its recent user conference. Nutanix understands that choice is an essential component for maximizing value from hardware investments. Caswell explained why this is necessary: "We believe that your data and applications will be more distributed over time. So it is a great value for customers to have the choice of running any application anywhere."

He added that this idea also applies to how they get to set their security protocols. "What I call 'follow - me security' can be set locally and established globally."

Understanding that customers operate at different speeds and possess varying organizational skills, Nutanix believes in providing options for diverse customer needs and capabilities. Whether they work with virtualized or non-virtualized environments, with a hypervisor or not, is completely up to  the customer .

Neither are customers locked in by licenses. Whereas Broadcom requires specific, separate implementations for each hyperscaler with distinct licenses, Nutanix offers one consistent implementation across all hyperscaler partners with license portability.

Nutanix doesn't lock customers into a single cloud environment either. Thanks to comprehensive cloud partnerships, Nutanix Cloud Clusters operates on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, providing consistent experiences across deployment models.

Planning for the future with pricing transparency

Nutanix differentiated itself, not just by its exceptional service, but also by its transparent pricing. It offers component pricing rather than predetermined bundle pricing, along with flexible terms and set rates they can rely on when projecting costs as far as three years out.

Other companies have operated the way cable television did in the past, foisting 99 additional channels on the people who only wanted one or two of them. Forcing customers to pay for predetermined bundles that include a lot of what they don't need or even want is a sure path to an unhappy customer experience. In contrast, Nutanix customers get the power to choose what they want included with a tailored plan customized to their needs and budget with a transparent pricing model.

Strategic validation

The proof of Nutanix's customer model lies in the ROI numbers. Numerous customers report money saved on building, operating, and governing their infrastructure. In a business value study conducted by IDC, surveyed Nutanix customers were estimated to see a three-year ROI of 391 percent and enjoy a 42% lower cost of IT operations over the same time period. "That economic justification is very powerful for customers," Caswell notes.

As organizations look for direction in their post-VMware reality, Nutanix is not just a substitute solution but a step up toward modernization and optimized ROI. Broadcom's post-acquisition changes have imposed a mandatory referendum on the VMware customer base, and many are voting with their feet.

Sponsored by Nutanix , Inc.