‘A lot of SMB enterprises know that they need to migrate their VMs to a multi-cloud or a hybrid cloud environment given their current economics of VMware,’ says Wanclouds CEO Faiz Khan regarding his company’s new free migration offer to move VMware VMs to AWS or IBM Cloud.

Wanclouds CEO Faiz Khan has heard the suffering of many VMware customers since the Broadcom acquisition, most recently,from VMware Cloud on AWS customers after the vendors’ partnership recently “went south.”

“We are getting pinged by different folks, even people who are already in AWS, and some customers that are pretty worried about their investment in VMware,” said Khan, a former longtime Cisco Systems top executive who founded Wanclouds in 2013.

Broadcom has changed VMware drastically since acquiring the company last year, including increasing prices, reducing VMware’s portfolio to four core product offerings, eliminating the VMware Partner Program and forcing AWS partners to no longer resell VMware Cloud on AWS.

“It has caused a lot of confusion with customers. We were hearing numbers like, ‘My cost is going to increase 5X to 10X to 25X, and some were even higher,’” said Khan. “Another thing people say is the road map—whether NSX may go away, maybe Broadcom may not be interested in NSX anymore, and so on. We are hearing a lot of things from customers who really are exploring their alternatives to VMware.”

[Related: WWT CEO On ‘Unhappy’ Broadcom VMware Customers Seeking Alternatives And WWT ‘Tripling’ AI Initiatives]

CRN has reached out to Broadcom for comment and will update this story if we hear back.

Wanclouds Launches Free Migration Service For Companies ‘Re-Evaluating’ VMware Workloads

On Thursday, the San Jose, Calif.-based IBM and AWS partner launched a complimentary Migration as a Service to AWS and IBM Cloud for companies “re-evaluating the best way to run their VMware workloads,” said Wanclouds.

Wanclouds is offering free migration of VMware virtual machines (VMs) to AWS or IBM Cloud for up to 150 VMs for new customers that sign up for its one-year managed service subscription.

The free cloud migration—which targets small and medium-size enterprises that are facing a rise in license fees and sun-lighted support for cloud deployment—gives them the ability to streamline the migration of VMware VMs via automation from Wanclouds’ VPC+ offering, Khan said. The offering is a SaaS application that provides multi-cloud migrations, disaster recovery, infrastructure visibility, cost optimization, along with compliance features.

Khan said Wanclouds has already helped dozens of companies back up and migrate VMware VMs to the cloud over the past several weeks via VPC+, which can take only a matter of hours to move the workloads.

“A lot of SMB enterprises know that they need to migrate their VMs to a multi-cloud or a hybrid cloud environment given their current economics of VMware,” said Khan. “However, due to the sticker shock of migrating this virtual infrastructure, these enterprises have been kicking the can down the road on making the migration. We hope this complimentary migration offer to AWS or IBM will enable them to kick-start their long-term platform strategy today, eliminate technical debt and set themselves up in cloud environments for success in the future.”

In an interview with CRN, Wanclouds’ CEO explains what he’s hearing from AWS and VMware customers, his company’s new free migration offering, as well as Wanclouds’ AI strategy.

What are you hearing from VMware Cloud on AWS customers since Broadcom eliminated the ability for AWS partners, like yourself, from reselling the cloud offer?

The AWS and VMware relationship went south.

That’s the reason we’re also getting pinged by even the AWS guys saying, ‘Hey, customers are pretty upset because they will lose support. They need to get to [Amazon] EC2 or get them out of VMware as quickly as possible.’

It’s not a topic that’s out of mind or is fully resolved right now either.

Customers whose current contracts are about to be renewed, they have to renew with a new scheme. And that means increasing their license costs.

Talk about launching your free migration service to help people get out of VMware.

We understand that migrations are a pretty stressful time for customers. So we are introducing a program where we can offer free migration for customers who have VMware and if they want to move to AWS EC2.

The caveat is that if they subscribe to our managed service once they move to the cloud, then we will migrate their workloads for free from VMware.

We’re trying to keep that to small-medium customers, people who have a 200- to 300-VM- type environment, which is fairly significant still. The idea is that we are confident that we have very strong IP, we know how this is done. We have done many, many of these migrations.

So instead of making this a big topic where customers say, ‘Hey, I really want to be out of VMware, but migration is going to be very expensive,’ we’re saying, ‘OK, you don’t really need to worry about that. We will help you basically manage your infrastructure in the cloud. If you sign up for that, we’ll give you the migration for free.’

What types of customers are you hearing from that are concerned about VMware’s future and their investment in VMware?

There are two sets of customers: One set of customers has very, very big environments—20,000 VMs and up to 50,000 VMs. Very, very large IT environments, so your Fortune 100-type companies.

Even they were worried.

Their worry was not only just a cost thing, but also the road map. People have built a lot of their infrastructure, skills and policies and everything based on their configuration of VMware.

But the biggest thing has been the sort of small-medium customers who do not have a lot of leverage to negotiate.

Then there is also where Broadcom is consolidating their channel plays as well and trying to become more selective. So all kinds of confusion.

As far as Wanclouds is concerned, from an opportunity perspective, we already have an IP and are also already offering migrations as a service. It’s also good that we are focused on public cloud partnerships with AWS to Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, also Microsoft Azure and so on. We’re pretty cloud-agnostic.

Why are VMware customers concerned right now?

We are getting pinged by different folks, even people who are already in AWS, and some customers that are pretty worried about their investment in VMware.

It has caused a lot of confusion with customers. We were hearing numbers like, ‘My cost is going to increase 5X to 10X to 25X, and some were even higher.

Another thing people say is the road map—whether NSX may go away, maybe Broadcom may not be interested in NSX anymore and so on. We are hearing a lot of things from customers who really are exploring their alternatives to VMware.

People are worrying about, ‘What should I do? I need help.’ But customers who have never been on AWS, for example, they face another challenge, which is, ‘How do I operate all my workloads on AWS? And what’s the best way to do that?’

So we try to address all of those questions. We help set them up, migrate them and then we help them manage that environment.

How is it going so far for Wanclouds in terms of migrating customers off VMware and winning new managed services deals?

As far as very large customers are concerned, they typically have a direct relationship with VMware, and they can work out whatever mechanism with Broadcom-VMware.

But you have more on the other side of customers, SMBs, where they don’t necessarily have a direct relationship with VMware.

For them, they feel helpless.

They have to go adopt whatever new model VMware is presenting, even if it means an increased cost. Some customers are just completely migrating out and getting rid of VMware.

Others are migrating some of the workloads and keeping a hybrid [environment]. Maybe they’re not too familiar with AWS, etc., they may find it risky to just completely change the environment for some of their critical apps.

We are also working with IBM Cloud. They have an offering—the VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, where the price differential is not that huge. So the area where customers are probably a bit more exposed right now is the AWS side because that relationship has soured.

For VMware-type customers, we’re also highlighting that if you don’t want to move out of VMware, that’s fine. We can actually back up your entire workloads to AWS. And when you want, you can restore them in AWS in a very, very short period of time. But if you’re not ready to completely unplug yourself from VMware, that’s fine with us too. So we are providing this flexibility and choices to customers.

We can’t end the conversation without talking about AI. What is Wanclouds’ AI strategy?

We recently introduced Cloud Whisperer, an AI-powered cloud assistant.

The idea there was that, similar to how we can migrate and back up the infrastructure, through Cloud Whisperer you can actually talk to your infrastructure.

Many companies are investing in that, including the cloud providers. But one of the unique values is that now you can actually have an AI product that can help discover your infrastructure, that can help you do backups, but it’s literally like a ChatGPT chatbot.

It’s intelligent enough to not only chat with you, but also understand your intent and take actions as well. We are combining our current IP that we have and enabling it now through AI.

Basically, you can now pretty much clearly talk to your infrastructure and take actions on the infrastructure. Some of the initial use cases that we’re going after is creating DR [disaster recovery] and backup for your multi-cloud infrastructure.