By Pankaj Srivastava, General Manager, Azure Partner Sales & Strategy
Over the past three years, Microsoft and VMware have worked together to deliver Azure VMware Solution (AVS) to customers in more than 30 Azure regions around the globe. AVS offers a VMware environment within Microsoft Azure that’s fully managed by Microsoft, making it easier for customers to seamlessly migrate or extend VMware workloads to the cloud.
For decades, customers have been running their on-premises servers and building their businesses on VMware virtualization technologies. But due to Broadcom’s recent changes to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licensing, customers who depend on VMware for their mission-critical workloads and applications are reevaluating their options. And according to Microsoft internal data, 75% of on-premises Windows Servers and SQL Servers are running on VMware.
Now, Microsoft partners have a significant opportunity to help customers optimize their VMware environments, migrate to the cloud, and set their businesses up for long-term success and innovation—starting with AVS.
The AVS difference
By choosing AVS, organizations can migrate their VMware workloads with little or no refactoring required and build upon their existing VMware skills—all while freeing up their teams to modernize on their terms and explore new ways to innovate with over 200 Azure services. This offers customers one of the fastest and most efficient paths to the cloud, combining the familiarity of the VMware environment and tech stack they already know with the scalability, security, and global reach of Azure.
Read on to learn how you can drive more cloud migrations and innovation for VMware customers with offers, resources, and support from Microsoft at every stage of the sales process.
Start the conversation
First, connect with your customers about their plans for their VMware workloads. With ready-to-go pitch decks and sales resources from our AVS Go Big initiative, you can highlight the key benefits of migrating to AVS. That includes price protection: customers can lock in pricing for one, three, or five years and get a 20% AVS discount when they purchase a new one-year Reserved Instance before June 30, 2025.
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