Migrating Infrastructure Platforms Is No Longer A ‘Should We?’ Conversation

Gartner analyst Mike Cisek explains how renewal pressure, pricing shock and operational reality are reshaping midmarket infrastructure decisions.

After Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in 2023, a majority of midsize organizations are now actively or passively pursuing VMware alternatives—driven by contract renewal pressure, pricing shock and other factors, says Mike Cisek, VP Analyst for Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud at research firm Gartner.

In a presentation given by Cisek during his session at the MES Spring Summit 2026 in Houston, he delivered a post-mortem on how midmarket IT executives were handling business platform modernization in the wake of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and the best practices for seeking alternative platforms.

Broadcom’s acquisition “changed the marketplace so much that it’s kind of hurt what you’re trying to do,” he said.

With only 10 percent to 15 percent of midsize organizations remaining committed to VMware, that loyalty is diminishing, Gartner data found.

For midmarket IT executives, a key point Cisek emphasized is that migrating platforms is no longer a “should we?” conversation. Rather, it’s more of a “when and how fast do we move” discussion that requires some thoughtful planning.

Key Migration Lessons From the Midmarket

Midmarket Infrastructure Decisions Are No Longer About Technical Superiority

Midmarket organizations do not typically need the top-of-the-line or the most expensive alternative platforms. In fact, most platforms that target the midmarket deliver more performance and capacity than most midsize organizations require.

Instead, Cisek advises focusing on cost.

“If you’re being asked to cut costs, you want to mitigate risk, you want to make sure that you can improve resilience, right? You’ve got to move to a platform that’s going to help you accomplish this,” he said.

“There are multiple ways to solve the problem, but these are the types of things that really should drive the selection process. So it’s not going to be best of breed; it’s not going to be massive scale. You don’t need to go into multi-cloud environments and modernize the application ecosystem and make it happen. You can solve a lot of these problems and win. You can get more operationally viable solutions that are cost-effective, that are going to enable your road map for the next three to five years,” he added.

Go Partner Shopping

VMware resellers and partners also took a hit after the acquisition— VMware’s partner ecosystem shrank significantly following Broadcom’s requalification changes.

Cisek said that that scenario is an advantage for IT leaders.

“Five-thousand [VMware] partners turned into 500 partners. Those 4,500 partners who could not requalify are now looking to embrace other solutions and bring them to you because, again, they have revenue that they need to make up.

“They are wanting to embrace things like [Microsoft] Hyper-V or [Microsoft] Azure ... or work with people like Scale [Computing]. It’s just part of the reality. Know it. Use it in terms of leverage when you’re trying to negotiate, look at what they can do in terms of migration assistance. There’s a lot of different benefits that come along with this,” he said.

Midmarket IT Leaders Are Finding Success Moving Quickly, Not Perfectly

When it comes to platform migration, he advised midmarket organizations to look at the overall strategy needed to migrate over getting mired in the details.

Leaner midmarket teams are more agile than large enterprises, and that is an advantage with a migration project.

“You look at the globals, and you look at the large enterprise—now they’re talking about skills. They’re going to be doing more of these things internally. They’re talking about technical debt that is associated with larger, more complex ecosystems,” Cisek said. “So again, it’s not that those aren’t issues in midsize organizations, but that shouldn’t be the thrust behind the alternative selection process,” he said.

Several midmarket IT leaders shared their migration strategies at the MES Spring Summit. Collectively, their plans involved migrating off VMware quickly, stabilizing on a viable alternative and revisiting their strategy later.

Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure Is Emerging As The Long-Term Standard

While many organizations take interim steps (alternative hypervisors, hyperconverged infrastructure), distributed hybrid infrastructure architectures are positioned as the likely midmarket standard within five years, Gartner indicated.

The model matters more than the underlying vendor stack, Cisek said, and shared several questions to explore before migrating to a new platform:

-Is the hybrid infrastructure design built to your desired outcomes on top of one of these new alternatives?

-Do you favor OpEx? Do you favor CapEx?

-Do you have five people? Do you have 10, what are you looking at?

-Are you more data center-centric or more cloud-centric?

Legacy Isn’t Always A Liability

Don’t be so quick to phase out legacy technology, Cisek said. Instead, take inventory of your oldest core systems and assess the approaches you are taking in terms of modernization.

The goal for the midmarket transformation is not to be bleeding edge. Rather, the focus should be on saving money, reducing complexity and getting rid of the risk, even if that means retaining legacy components.

Above all, when looking for VMware alternatives, don’t look for a VMware replica.

“If you look for an alternative to VMware, you’re going to be disappointed. The biggest mistake people make is doing that comparison,” Cisek said.

“What you’ve got to focus on are the requirements, the size, scale, cost, operational viability; little bit of long-term vision. These types of things matter more than the technical underpinnings of the alternatives themselves,” he said.