For years, many chief information officers (CIOs) looked at VMware-to-cloud migrations with a wary pragmatism. Manually mapping dependencies and rewriting legacy apps mid-flight was not an enticing, low-lift proposition for enterprise IT teams.

But the calculus for such decisions has changed dramatically in a short period of time. Following recent VMware licensing changes, organizations are seeing greater uncertainty around the platform’s future. At the same time, cloud-native innovation is accelerating. According to the CNCF’s 2024 Annual Survey, 89% of organizations have already adopted at least some cloud-native techniques, and the share of companies reporting nearly all development and deployment as cloud-native grew sharply from 2023 to 2024 (20% to 24%). And market research firm IDC reports that cloud providers have become top strategic partners for generative AI initiatives.

This is all happening amid escalating pressure to innovate faster and more cost-effectively to meet the demands of an AI-first future. As enterprises prepare for that inevitability, they are facing compute demands that are difficult, if not prohibitively expensive, to maintain exclusively on-premises.

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