‘Toshiba had been using [VMware] for 16 years, and that relationship and trust has been eroded now,’ Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami tells CRN.
When Toshiba saw its VMware price tag explode by 10X, the tech giant knew it needed to find an alternative solution after being a loyal VMware customer for 16 years.
“Suddenly, [VMware’s] cost changed,” said Katsuhiro Nigorikawa, CTO of Toshiba Information Systems, in an interview with CRN. “We turned to Nutanix’s strengths in HCI [hyperconverged infrastructure]. Nutanix HCI was the best option for cost reduction.”
The Japanese company is currently migrating 2,200 virtual machines off VMware-Broadcom to Nutanix.
Toshiba is a longtime VMware vSphere customer but once Broadcom condensed VMware’s once-massive product portfolio into just a few bundled offerings, Toshiba became a brand-new customer of Nutanix.
“Toshiba had not used Nutanix before, but the price increase from VMware is what triggered their thinking,” Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami told CRN. “They’re going to be migrating to our HCI, which is going to give them TCO cost reductions as well as part of their modernization.”
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The first phase of migrating 2,200 VMs off VMware to Nutanix will focus on certain Japanese corporate divisions inside Toshiba, which Nigorikawa said will take between one and two years.
“We cannot migrate, to date, each department. That takes time. We are a global company. We are only focusing on Japan right now,” said Nigorikawa.
However, Ramaswami said large enterprise migrations moving off VMware to Nutanix can sometimes be quicker.
“For example, a financial services company has finished their migration. They migrated 24,000 virtual machines in less than a year. They’re done with the migration. They’re completely out of [VMware],” said Ramaswami.
“Toshiba had been using them for 16 years, and that relationship and trust has been eroded now,” he said.
VMware-Broadcom, for its part, believes its VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation bundles provide a better TCO versus the competition.
“Our sophistication in pooling and sharing resources and in automation has resulted in our approach having the lowest total cost of ownership compared to any other solution in public cloud or on-prem,” said Broadcom CEO Hock Tan recently.
Regarding VCF’s total cost of ownership versus public cloud or on-premises architectures, Prashanth Shenoy—Broadcom’s CMO and vice president of its VCF Division—told CRN this year that Broadcom studies have shown “we are 40 percent better than native public cloud or three-tiered, hardware-defined data center architectures.” VMware declined to comment on the Toshiba story.
Nigorikawa said Toshiba selected Nutanix compared with other VMware-Broadcom competitors because of the company’s successful AHV hypervisor history being integrated with its unified HCI platform. In addition, Nutanix’s Move migration product is helping Toshiba easily and seamlessly transfer VMs from VMware to Nutanix AHV.
“Our company is very big and complex. AHV is already 10 years old and a mature solution,” said Nigorikawa. “Their migration tool Move is also very important to us as it helps us migrate.”
In an interview with CRN, Ramaswami talked about winning over Toshiba and why companies of all shapes and sizes are leaving VMware-Broadcom for Nutanix.
“We’ll continue to grow our customer base. We’re committed to both innovation as well as broadening our ecosystem and taking care of our customers for the long term,” Nutanix’s CEO said.
Talk about some of the large customers you’re winning from VMware-Broadcom.
There are many companies who have migrated from Broadcom to Nutanix. Large companies like Micron Technology, Tractor Supply, [global market research firm] Moody’s and the U.S. Navy are with us today. I mean, these are big names just like Toshiba.
How long does it take for these large customers to migrate off VMware? Can you give some real examples?
It takes time for large enterprises to make changes like this. It’s a pretty significant change for them. And we’ve been saying that this is a multiyear journey, and it’s not going to happen overnight.
But we do think a subset of customers out there are moving, and they have started their journey now. Some of them are actually completed.
For example, a financial services company has finished their migration. They migrated 24,000 virtual machines in less than a year. They’re done with the migration. They’re completely out of [VMware].
One of the largest insurance companies in America, a Fortune 500, they are going through a systematic migration. They’re in the middle of the migration right now. They have migrated about 12,000 VMs so far in nine months. We are starting to see some large customers migrate.
An example of small customers, it’s Florida’s largest law firm. They had a relatively small estate, 100 virtual machines. They completed that migration in two weeks—completely—and they did this by themselves. It didn’t require huge effort.
So we’re seeing this happen at a multiyear time scale for sure, but it’s happening.
Why did Toshiba pick Nutanix?
I was just in Japan last month, I think there is very much a sense in Japan from Japanese customers that they feel like, ‘Hey, had a long-term relationship with VMware.’
Toshiba had been using them for 16 years, and that relationship and trust has been eroded now. And that’s why they’re looking at other options.
We’re fortunate to have Toshiba as a customer. They’re a new customer for us. They have not used Nutanix before.
They’re just starting their migration. The first phase is their corporate IT.
The price increase from VMware is what triggered their thinking. And as part of this migration, they’re also going to be migrating from what we call a three-tier environment—they have servers and storage—to HCI. They’re going to be migrating to our HCI, which is going to give them TCO cost reductions as well as part of this modernization.
Talk about TCO on Nutanix versus VMware-Broadcom. What is Nutanix’s differentiation against Broadcom-VMware as a whole?
They’re moving to Nutanix because of a couple of things. No. 1: a better TCO compared to whatever they’re looking at. We have delivered that, otherwise they would not pick us.
No. 2 is also around, ‘Are we going to take care of them? Are we going to support them?’ These are mission-critical applications. They can’t fail. So you need good, world-class support to make sure that the vendor cares about the customer.
The third is really the innovation of the road map. How much are you investing in research and innovation to be able to drive future announcements for the platform?
Because for a company like Toshiba, they were with VMware for 16 years. Why were they there? Because VMware continued to innovate over time.
So we are doing that. We are investing in R&D. We’re innovating for the future. With Broadcom cutting costs, it’s not clear how much they will innovate. They’ll get the next release and get the next release, but they’re not going to necessarily do breakthrough innovation.
All of these are reasons why businesses migrate.
What makes you bullish about Nutanix in 2025?
We’ve gone from being a best-of-breed HCI provider to a full cloud platform company with a broad ecosystem.
You see it with our Pure [Storage] announcement. Our expanded Dell PowerFlex partnership. We have a new Nvidia partnership. So we’ve got there.
Any customer doing the migration wants to migrate to a good end state. Somebody who can deliver a good end state, who will take care of them, but will also invest and be there for the next 10 years. Because these are not short-term decisions that [Toshiba] made. This is a longer-term decision to go partner with somebody else.
Lastly, we are also investing in the future. We’re creating a platform for running cloud- native applications anywhere, and then agentic AI. So we are investing.
We’ll continue to grow our customer base. We’re committed to both innovation as well as broadening our ecosystem and taking care of our customers for the long term.
