ClearScale CEO Jimmy Chui explains why price-concerned VMware customers need to migrate to AWS, his company’s new AI-powered offerings to help them, and why businesses need to ‘really get off all their licensed software.’

ClearScale is launching an AI-powered attack seeking to migrate existing VMware customers worried about price increases over to the AWS cloud.

“What we’re seeing in the market is this really tight control around VMware pricing,” ClearScale CEO Jimmy Chui told CRN. “Customers only understand what their pricing is going to look like when they’re approaching their renewal. … We’re definitely seeing VMware right now being 3X to 10X the cost [compared with pricing prior to Broadcom’s acquisition] at least with the customers that we’ve been engaging.”

The San Francisco-based AWS Premier Tier Services partner has created an “easy button” to migrate VMware VMs and workloads over to AWS by launching ClearScale’s new VMware-to-AWS Accelerator offering.

“Customers have been paying for the luxury of the easy button with VMware. I was a big VMware fan in the previous part of my career. I spent 10 years getting us onto VMware and running 10,000 VMs, and it was definitely the easy button,” Chui said. “Fast forward to today, if you make a massive switch to AWS cloud from VMware, you need the next easy button. This is it.”

[Related: AWS Vs. Microsoft Vs. Google Cloud Earnings Q2 2024 Face-Off]

Since Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of VMware last year, VMware by Broadcom has gone through several monumental changes that reshaped the company. This included reducing its portfolio from thousands of products to just four core product subscription-based offerings; eliminating the VMware Partner Connect Program; increasing prices; and terminating AWS’ reseller agreements with AWS, requiring customers now to go directly to Broadcom for procurement of VMware Cloud on AWS.

ClearScale’s New AI VMware-to-AWS Accelerator Offerings

These massive changes affecting VMware customers led to ClearScale creating its new VMware-to-AWS Accelerator offerings, which are a set of services designed for businesses that want to migrate their VMware environments to AWS infrastructure and modernize on the cloud.

ClearScale Thursday launched three AI-powered services.

The new VMware Exit Assessment service includes AI-driven analysis of a company’s VMware environment to identify cost savings; ClearScale experts to oversee current consumption, cost and provisioning of VMware workloads; and the design of a customized road map for transitioning to AWS.

Another ClearScale new offering is VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS Exit Assessment, which employs AI to assess a company’s VMware Cloud on AWS environment and develop a strategy for exiting to AWS cloud-native services.

The third offering, SA On-Demand—VMware/VMC Exit Strategy, includes a no-cost, one-on-one access to ClearScale’s AWS-certified solutions architects who can design and implement a cloud strategy and cost-benefit analysis. ClearScale’s experts offer guidance on DevOps, licensing rationalization, automation and more.

Founded in 2011, ClearScale has helped over 400 companies migrate to the cloud. The solution provider holds 12 AWS Competencies and has delivered more than 1,000 AWS cloud products.

In an interview with CRN, Chui explains why price-concerned VMware customers need to migrate to AWS, ClearScale’s new AI-powered offerings and why businesses’ need to “really get off of all their licensed software.”

Why are you launching these new VMware to AWS migration offers right now? What are you seeing in the market?

What we’re seeing in the market is this really tight control around VMware pricing. Customers only understand what their pricing is going to look like when they’re approaching their renewal.

They’ve got to reach out to the VMware rep. The VMware rep then processes, ‘OK, how much are we going to charge this customer? They’ve got to move to these packages.’

We’re definitely seeing VMware right now being 3X to 10X the cost [compared with pricing prior to Broadcom’s acquisition] at least with the customers that we’ve been engaging.

But beyond that, we’ve been doing VMware to AWS migrations for a very long time.

One of the key pieces is being able to talk with customers and get them to look at the strategic side of this decision. We’ve got to calm them down, ‘Hey, don’t worry. We’ll take care of you. But if you treat cloud like a place, like a data center or like just another IT tool, that’s not where you’re going to get the most ROI for that cloud investment.’

If you treat cloud like a business strategy, we can start to really talk through, ‘How does it impact your organization?’

How are you helping VMware customers with their costs and ROI when migrating to AWS?

We can really push the needle for customers and get them on the most elastic services, reduce their costs and give them the agility they need in the marketplace—that’s where the real value or ROI of a cloud investment is. It’s getting to that cloud state.

And by AWS layering on these [partner migration] incentives, it’s really helping us to be able to talk with customers if they’re on the fence or they’re concerned about finances around VMware costing much more.

We’re able to leverage a lot of funding programs to get the migrations done and bring customers close to a net-neutral cost, as far as consulting and the first six months of our managed services. We’re hopeful that by doing that right, we’re able to then engage a customer on modernization of their platform, i.e., reducing additional licensing costs, even outside VMware.

I think about 90 percent of VMware workloads are going to be Microsoft Windows, Microsoft SQL, etc. and that money saved can be spent on actually getting them off those license platforms and on to stuff like Postgres or other open-source or AWS services that don’t have the hefty licensing cost.

AWS is throwing [cloud] credits, migration incentives and partner funding to make that shift more economically feasible for customers.

Talk about your new AI-powered VMware-to-AWS Accelerator service offerings.

Our new offerings are assessments powered by AI. We’re leveraging AI all throughout the company, and it starts with the discovery meetings with our customers.

We prefer to have them recorded so we can put them in the AI system and start to create a context for that customer. Because as it goes from engineer to engineer, things get lost in translation, etc., and we want to bake that into an AI system that truly understands every conversation we’ve had with the customer.

The system also leverages our existing data of projects that we’ve done in the past and really helps us to generate solid project plans, requirements, deliverables—especially on the development side.

When development comes into the picture, it’s really hard to assess. So we’re using AI to process the data we collected.

So it’s AI, but then there’s also automation tools—for example, for scanning code bases—understanding really where customers are at so we can develop the plan to get them where they need to be. We’re also leveraging AI as projects kick off into real implementation.

We’re bringing down the costs associated with the actual migration to leverage that, to perform the application development side of the work. And the tooling that we have today is—in comparison to what we had even three years ago—it’s astounding how much information and how much we can accelerate these projects, from augmented code development, etc.

It’s really becoming viable for companies to basically, really get off all their licensed software.

How important and impactful will ClearScale’s new offerings be for VMware customers?

The VMware issue I see as the catalyst to get organizations to think things through more clearly. What I’m seeing out in the market is some of the concerns are, ‘Hey, I don’t want a knee-jerk reaction and then jump into something.’ And I wholeheartedly support that.

This is about, ‘Let’s have this conversation on what the end state really needs to look like, rather than—‘Oh my gosh, my VMware bill is 5X, 6X, 7X more than it used to be. I need to get off of VMware.’

So the appetite is starting to grow there. The early adopters are definitely in that space right now. We’re really opening the door for the conversation.

Customers have been paying for the luxury of the easy button with VMware. I was a big VMware fan in the previous part of my career. I spent 10 years getting us onto VMware and running 10,000 VMs, and it was definitely the easy button. So, fast forward to today, if you make a massive switch to AWS cloud from technology like VMware, you need the next easy button.

We’re now able to get deeper into painting a picture of, ‘Look, with all this new AI tooling in place, we can accelerate and get you to the technology that’s actually going to save you money in the cloud in the long run.’