Customers going multivendor and multicloud: Think Solutions

In the wake of VMware’s acquisition, partners’ customers are looking to diversify their tech tools where they can – and futureproof where they can’t.

This is according to managed service provider (MSP) Think Solutions sales director Pedro Duarte, who said during a roundtable discussion hosted by Nutanix, that after VMware’s acquisition, customers are preparing themselves for lifts and shift over to a multivendor strategy.

“Many years ago, when cloud was a buzzword, [customers] just lifted and shifted workloads to the cloud. A lot of customers got burned by that and are starting to repatriate back and the ones that haven’t are thinking about their strategy of what they do,” he said.

“A lot of the apps they were trying to move were legacy apps that weren’t containerised. So, a lot of customers now are actually investing the time to containerise their apps to get ready to shift as the market shifts; pick a cloud today or pick on-premises tomorrow and be able to move between different platforms easily and consistently.

“I think the consistency and the operational simplicity of containers is driving that change. In Australia, we’ve got huge cloud adoption compared to other regions and, at the moment, containers are the buzzword everyone’s focusing on.”

Multivendor splendour

The overall strategy however is dependent on the size of the customer in question. Duarte said Think Solutions’ smaller customers were faced with a predicament – moving away from VMware is difficult because budgets are tight for this group, but they also have the agility to take on change at a quicker pace than larger organisations.

“Some of them took the risk and have now implemented, where possible, multivendor strategies where they’re not trying to put all their eggs in one basket,” he said.

Think Solutions assesses clients’ usage of software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications by considering whether it is a critical business application hosted by a provider and, if so, if it can take over some of the management overhead.

With larger clients, their size prevents them from lifting and shifting quickly, so priorities are placed instead on preventing being locked into any specific vendor in the future instead.

“It’s all about having freedom of choice and building platforms that allows them to move if these things happen again, but also then having dual vendors in their environment,” Duarte said.

“It’s no longer putting everything in one place and then having this massive conundrum that they have now.

“So, it really depends on customer size, but we’re seeing every customer now actively thinking about this as part of their ongoing life cycle.”

Emphasising how partners want choice, Duarte also said that he sees ongoing conversations about customers not only moving away from Broadcom but repatriating away from the cloud and/or or moving to other platforms.

“That multivendor strategy is there and that risk appetite now is a lot lower than what it used to be from a single vendor. The reality is that the change is happening.”

He added that he sees Broadcom as having a “20/80” strategy, with a focus on the top 20 per cent of its customers.

“The other 80 per cent, they don’t really care about. Those other 80 per cent are being impacted in a lot larger way than the top 20 per cent are.”

Duatre claimed one vendor that enables that freedom of choice is Nutanix, pointing towards various tools to enable moves away from VMware, such as Nutanix AHV and  Nutanix Move.

“I’ve got a scenario at the moment where we’ve just migrated a customer that had 400 terabytes of data,” he said. Typically, when you’re looking at that scale of migration from a different hypervisor, that’s a major undertaking. The reality is, with Nutanix Move, that was a week.

“So, a customer wants to shift quickly and we can shift quickly because the tooling supports that instead of making it extremely complex.”

Moving to multicloud

Duatre added Think Solutions’ approach in the market is consultative and isn’t trying to force what isn’t wholly necessary, be it multiple vendors or multiple clouds.

That requires assessment of the SaaS applications and asking customers if its “critical on a business application posted by a provider or if it can “take some of that management overhead off that client”, he explained.

“Certain workloads just tend to be better in cloud, others just tend to be better suited in on-premises,” said Duarte.

“It’s more an education piece and we find that because of the complexity of IT today, it’s often lots of workshops and lots of education before we get to a point where we’re recommending a solution. So, I wouldn’t say we necessarily convince a customer to go one way or another.

“The reality is every customer we’re talking to is considering multicloud strategies; that’s the reality of the IT industry today. Whether they whether they see that or not, because some liken SaaS applications and Microsoft 365 to cloud. Well, they are cloud, so every customer has a multicloud strategy today.”