When Broadcom gutted the VMware partner program last year, the conventional wisdom was that Nutanix would be the primary beneficiary. That's partially true. But six months later, the full picture is more interesting than a simple one-to-one migration story.
Nutanix did well. They added 2,700 new customers in a single year, hitting 29,000 total. Nutanix was smart enough to create an accelerated onboarding path specifically for displaced VMware partners — including a fast-track certification program for VCP holders, reduced fees, and dedicated partner managers. Good execution on an obvious opportunity.
But the bigger story is Microsoft. A significant number of mid-market VMware partners didn't switch to another hyperconverged platform. They moved their customers to Azure Stack HCI and Hyper-V. The logic is straightforward: their customers were already paying for Microsoft licensing. Adding Azure hybrid capabilities onto existing Microsoft agreements was an easier conversation than ripping out VMware and replacing it with a different proprietary stack.
The third lane — and the one nobody's reporting on — is open source. Proxmox adoption among smaller MSPs and VARs surged — industry estimates peg it at roughly 16% global market mindshare in server virtualization, up from near-zero in enterprise a year prior. The appeal is obvious: no licensing costs, no vendor lock-in, no partner program that can be revoked on a quarterly earnings call. The tradeoff is support and enterprise features, but for a 30-person MSP managing SMB customers, Proxmox does 80% of what VMware did at zero percent of the cost.
What does this tell us? When a vendor breaks trust at scale, the channel doesn't just switch vendors. It rethinks the entire category. Some partners went to the obvious competitor. Some went to the platform they were already paying for. Some decided they'd rather maintain their own stack than trust another vendor with the keys.
Broadcom wanted to consolidate the partner base. They did. Just not the way they planned. The partners they lost didn't consolidate into fewer VMware partners. They dispersed across three different ecosystems, and they took their customers with them.