VMware customers stung by Broadcom's changes can now breathe a sigh of relief; Rimini Street has introduced a comprehensive offering to give support and certainty for years into the future.
You don't have to be a VMware customer to know Broadcom's acquisition of the company and products has not gone well for many customers and partners. Broadcom's aggressive strategy to rapidly recoup its costs has seen many partners removed from the channel, many customers stung with huge price increases, license changes, and staff cuts. That even includes, anecdotally, VMware trainers being chopped while still delivering training.
If you're a VMware location, you may be wondering what to do in the face of bleak choices: pay a lot more money, or go elsewhere - but where, and how, and for how much?
Well, Rimini Street, the global leader in third-party enterprise software support for Oracle and SAP products, is now providing a comprehensive offering targeted directly at VMware perpetual license holders, with Rimini Support, Rimini Protect, and Rimini Consult.
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Along with its Oracle and SAP street-cred, Rimini Street is a Salesforce and AWS partner, and pretty much has seen it all. In fact, while internally proving up the concept of giving VMware support, the company identified it had historically solved many VMware issues through other client cases that came across its engineers' desks. "We assessed well over a thousand scenarios and cases to understand the scope and type of requests [that VMware customers face]," explained Rimini Street EVP global transformation David Rowe (pictured).
Rimini Street has long been the leading provider of independent support for enterprise software and has created its new VMware solutions as a direct result of client demand. "We had clients asking us about alternate solutions and what to do," Rowe said.
And when it comes to the "what to do," the short answer is there is no short answer. "It is a mix based on the workloads, applications, and tech," Rowe said. The new Rimini Street solutions "give organisations the time and flexibility to do this assessment." Of course, there's not even a need to change at all. "They can continue to run with us for the foreseeable future."
Gartner Research states it expects large-scale VMware customers to take anywhere between 18 months to four years to fully transition from VMware. Rimini Street now helps such customers have that time to breathe and think and plan, without concerns of support or risk. Importantly, too, without another ticking time bomb. "We have customers we've supported for 15 years or more," Rowe said. "Some customers will do a three-year deal with us on their way to other options, others aren't sure. For those where VMware is an important part of their footprint and have not had to make assessments of other options, they are now scrambling. It will take a while."
It's from this milieu that Rimini Street's three new service offerings were born.
These offerings are Rimini Support, Rimini Protect, and Rimini Consult. These offerings allow perpetually-licensed VMware customers to continue running their current systems for years into the future with guaranteed 24/7/365 support, and with fees similar to the current support fees paid to VMware.
Rimini Support offers:
- dedicated support services for configuration, performance, installation, upgrade, and customisation
- a named primary support engineer with an average of 15 years of experience
- guaranteed 10-minute response SLA for critical cases
- Rimini Street’s patented AI technology, Case Assignment Advisor, empowering its engineers to resolve cases much faster by recommending the optimal engineer based on 40+ vectors
Rimini Protect for VMware offers proactive fast and cost-effective security protection against known and unknown threats and vulnerabilities and includes:
- guidance on mitigating risk by strengthening the configuration of the VMware ecosystem
- Rimini Street’s self-developed Security Vulnerability Analysis Reports (SVARs), intelligence reports that include mitigation options and strategies
- zero-day reporting
- level 1 Security Assessments
Rimini Consult for VMware brings expert consulting services to help VMware customers identify their best path forward and help align technology strategy with business objectives. Services include:
- technical and application road mapping and strategy
- technology assessments
- license advisory
- interoperability and integration
- staff and skills augmentation
- cloud migrations
To find out more about Rimini Street's VMware offering, email vmware@riministreet.com or click here.