Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced a promotion that could potentially disrupt the market share of its competitor, VMware. The company is offering free virtualization software for up to one year as part of its ‘HPE Morpheus Software—VM Essentials’ package.
This move is seen as an attempt by HPE to entice customers who are unhappy with Broadcom’s pricing model for VMware. According to HPE’s website, the VM Essentials platform includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management, allowing users to manage both VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from one console.
The company also offers a free year of licenses for VM Essentials, as well as a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines. HPE’s promotion is seen as a response to the recent changes in VMware’s pricing model, which has shifted from perpetual licenses to expensive packages.
Broadcom, the parent company of VMware, has also introduced a per-core basis for vSphere licensing, leading to increased costs for customers. In contrast, HPE recommends charging $600 per CPU socket per year for VM Essentials.
“Customers are feeling quite a bit of pain in the change that some of the virtualization companies have put there, specifically Broadcom,” said Jeremiah Jenson, VP of HPE’s North American channel and partner ecosystem, in an interview with CRN. “VM Essentials could bring up to 90 percent cost savings compared to VMware while also helping to eliminate vendor lock-in and simplify hybrid IT.”
The promotion is available through channel partners only, a stark contrast from Broadcom’s approach of drastically reducing the number of resellers that can sell VMware products. HPE has also announced that it will give 600 reseller partners who earn the HPE partner program’s Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by the end of the year free VM Essentials software licenses for three years.
While some experts believe that the promotion could drive sales and adoption of VM Essentials, others are skeptical. Dean Colpitts, CTO of Canadian managed services provider (MSP) Members IT Group (MITG), which VMware cut from its reseller program after 19 years of partnership a year ago, doesn’t expect the promotion to have a significant impact on sales.
“The biggest issue I’m seeing right now that is affecting VM Essentials sales and adoption is [that] the high prices and constraints of DRAM [are] affecting customers’ ability to obtain new hardware to migrate onto,” Colpitts said. “On the other hand, one of HPE’s biggest channel partners, San Diego-based Nth Generation, is expecting its ‘VM Essentials sales pipeline to as much as quadruple and sales to grow at about that rate’ because of HPE’s promotion.
HPE’s move could potentially disrupt the market share of VMware, which has been a dominant player in the virtualization software market for years. However, it remains to be seen whether the promotion will be enough to lure customers away from VMware.
Source: Original article