Key facts
- HPE is offering one year of free VM Essentials software to customers to encourage migration from VMware.
- Reseller partners can receive three years of free VM Essentials licenses if they earn a specific competency by year-end.
- One channel partner expects a quadrupling of their VM Essentials sales pipeline due to the promotion.
- A managed services provider CTO believes the promotion is a step in the right direction but is shortsighted in its limited scope.
- Customers face challenges with hardware availability and the cost of running dual virtualization products during migration.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has launched a new promotion offering one year of free VM Essentials software to customers, aiming to encourage them to migrate away from VMware. This initiative comes amid third-party surveys indicating a significant number of VMware customers are considering reducing or eliminating their use of the software, though concerns about migration costs and time are expected to slow adoption.
HPE's EVP and CTO, Fidelma Russo, acknowledged that customers often face "double expenses" during operating model transformations, which can include paying for two virtualization products simultaneously. This sentiment was echoed by Dean Colpitts, CTO of Members IT Group (MITG), who noted that clients typically integrate purchases into longer life cycles. Colpitts also highlighted current issues with high prices and DRAM constraints affecting customers' ability to acquire new hardware for permanent migrations or temporary solutions.
Conversely, Nth Generation, a major HPE channel partner, anticipates its VM Essentials sales pipeline to quadruple as a result of the promotion. Co-president and CTO Dan Molina stated that the free licensing and migration capabilities significantly lower the risk for customers moving to VM Essentials.
In addition to customer incentives, HPE will provide free VM Essentials software licenses for three years to 600 reseller partners who achieve the HPE partner program’s Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by the end of the year, though support costs will still apply. Colpitts described this partner benefit as a "step in the correct direction" but criticized the limitation to 600 partners as "very shortsighted," suggesting HPE should offer the software to all partners to accelerate displacement of competitors.