Las Vegas is a fitting place for the final Gartner IOCS conference of 2025. Because for IT leaders everywhere, the odds have changed and the future of their virtualization strategy is suddenly on the line. For the first time in more than two decades, enterprises are being forced to confront a question most never considered: What comes after VMware?
This is not a theoretical exercise, and it’s not a “we should look into…” consideration. Renewals are rolling in, price increase threats are becoming invoices, and IT foundations are suddenly very shaky.
Across Orlando, Barcelona, London, and now Las Vegas, the message was consistent and unmistakable: 2026 will be the year organizations make their biggest private-cloud decision in a generation. And in that environment, one theme dominated every conversation at the Platform9 booth and our theatre session with founders: “Keep operations familiar while you modernize on your terms.”
The New Reality: Enterprises Aren’t Choosing a Vendor — They’re Choosing a Future
When VMware changed, everything downstream changed with it: cost models, platform strategy, partner ecosystems, even internal team charters.
What became clear at all of the Gartner events this year is that leaders aren’t just evaluating alternatives; they’re evaluating how they approach workload management for the future. Do we remain dependent on monolithic hyper-converged stacks? Do we refactor to cloud-native whether we’re ready or not? Do we settle for a DIY solution using a lightweight hypervisor, losing the enterprise features and operational guarantees our business relies on? Or do we take a different path, one that preserves continuity while opening the door to modernization?
That’s where the market conversation has shifted. People aren’t asking, “Who has one-to-one feature parity?” They don’t want a mirror of VMware; they want a platform that preserves the behaviors they depend on.
The “Parity” Problem — and What VMware Exit Really Means
“Parity” has become a very popular word in post-VMware discussion. It’s not the primary driver of VMware exits; that is cost and reduced licensing options. But parity is one of the first buying criteria people want to discuss when looking at VMware alternatives.
At our booth, teams told us what parity actually means to them:
- Integrations with the tools they already use
- Familiar VM management experience
- Flexible HA options that match the customer’s HA/DR profile
- Automatic workload balancing
- Multi-tenancy and self-service options
- Risk-free migration, guided migration strategies
This is the difference between simply checking boxes and finding a platform that maintains business continuity. It’s also why Platform9 Private Cloud Director resonated so strongly. It isn’t a “hypervisor replacement.” It’s a VMware-class private cloud, running on the hardware you already own, without lock-in — and without forcing you into a single-vendor HCI stack.
What do buyers want most as they transition out of VMware? Familiarity.
After many conversations, one sentiment came through louder than anything else: “We don’t want a revolution. We want a roadmap.” Customers want to keep the VM experience, avoid disruptive architecture changes, maintain their operational experience, and modernize on their terms and timeline.
2026: The Year Enterprises Rebuild Their Virtualization Strategy
If 2025 was the year of disruption, 2026 will be the year of reconstruction — thoughtful, staged, modernization driven by a new kind of private cloud model.
The Gartner audience validated this again and again: The future isn’t basic hypervisors, and it isn’t forced refactoring.
It’s a private cloud that:
- Runs traditional and modern apps
- Supports VMs and containers side-by-side
- Works with existing hardware investments
- Provides an open ecosystem and prevents vendor lock-in
- Scales into a full private cloud fabric when their organization is ready
A Year of High Stakes Ends With Clarity
In a year defined by forced transitions, pricing shocks, and architectural uncertainty, the VMware question dominated every Gartner event. Enterprises want operational continuity today and a modernization runway tomorrow. That’s exactly what the Private Cloud Maturity Model enables.
But as we wrap the final show of 2025 in Las Vegas, the mood is shifting from anxiety to action.
Infrastructure leaders now know:
- They can exit VMware without disruption.
- They can preserve the operational model their teams rely on.
- They can modernize at their pace, not their vendor’s.
- They can choose an open ecosystem instead of a single-vendor dependency.
- They can build a virtualization solution that looks and feels like the future — not the past.
To everyone we spoke with in Orlando, Barcelona, London, and Las Vegas, thank you for trusting us with your concerns, your roadmap challenges, and your vision for what comes next. 2026 is going to be a defining year for private cloud. And for the first time in a long time, enterprises finally have real options. To begin your own staged modernization, contact us for a free migration assessment and see how Platform9 can help you exit VMware on your terms.
