VMware wants to help fund your next cloud migration

Totally not about trying to keep customers in the ecosystem. Okay, maybe a lot about that

VMware says it will help pay for your enterprise to move workloads to the cloud.

The virtualization giant’s newly minted Multi-cloud Acceleration Program (MCAP) provides funding and access to VMware partners to offset the cost of migrations.

VMware’s strategy appears to be that if customers are going to migrate workloads to the cloud — the company estimates 73 percent of enterprises already have applications deployed in multiple clouds — it might as well have a hand in the decision making process in a way that benefits channel partners and pushes customers toward its own products.

“Cloud migration can be a massive undertaking for customers, especially when in-house capabilities are lacking,” said Terence Gleeson, senior director under VMware’s Cloud on AWS division, in a blog post.

“The expense of migrations can be a challenge as well, blocking opportunities for partners to deliver high-margin professional, advisory services and expand the footprint of their VMware practice with new and current customers.”

While the program might seem counterintuitive for a company that’s made a name for itself taming on-prem datacenters, VMware is now focused on multi-cloud rigs. The software vendor also has symbiotic relationships with the major public cloud providers — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba to name a few — to offer its software stack on their public infrastructure.

The program doesn’t have any restrictions regarding which or how many clouds customers can choose as migration targets, but the catch is the program isn’t free and requires the direct involvement from VMware’s channel partners.

While migration help is needed, as we reported in September, running VMware’s virtualization stack in the cloud hasn’t always been easy or cheap.

When VMware Cloud on AWS launched in 2017, customers were required to rent four hosts and sign up for either one or three years, a commitment that worked out to at least $16,000 a month. At VMware Explore earlier this year, VMware lifted the requirement to run its software on a dedicated host, enabling customers to run VMs on “slices,” which for all intents and purposes is equivalent to an AWS EC2 instance.

The launch of VMware’s latest multi-cloud program is timely, as cloud providers report declining demand for cloud services, and enterprise customers contend with extended backlogs on new equipment purchases. However, if a recent Canalys report is to believed, customers should expect public cloud prices to surge as much as 30 percent over the next year as providers look to offset higher energy costs. ®