Timing Is Everything: Lessons from the Mainframe and Today’s VMware Disruption

Broadcom’s Disruption Creates Opportunity — But Only for Those Who Move Fast

Back in 2009 and 2010, I took a full-time role as Director of Infrastructure at Integral Systems. It was a solid company with a mature product: payroll software for the IBM mainframe. The vision at the time was ambitious. Integral wanted to expand into hosting mainframe workloads for other customers. This wasn’t just a traditional ASP model. It was early thinking around IaaS and SaaS, a hybrid approach before either term had fully matured. The idea was to take the complexity of managing mainframes off customers’ plates and deliver SaaS-like benefits.

I had the opportunity to do some really interesting work. I put a mainframe on the floor of a colocation facility. That sounds simple, but colo pricing back then was often based on how many floor tiles your equipment used. Power was a secondary concern, even though a mainframe pulls a lot of it. That experience gave me a crash course in z/OS and high-end infrastructure.

Despite the excitement, we missed the market. The timing was off. By the time we had a real offering, most customers that wanted to get off mainframes had already moved. They had replatformed to x86 or modernized their applications. The remaining customers had already committed to running their own mainframes. There just wasn't enough of a market left.

That story keeps coming back to me as I watch the Broadcom acquisition of VMware unfold. Broadcom owns CA, the legacy mainframe software vendor, and they are now reshaping VMware in a similar fashion. Their licensing and pricing changes have made it significantly harder for small organizations and service providers to justify using VMware Cloud Foundation. The economics just don’t work for everyone anymore.

Now, the ecosystem is reacting. There is a rush to find alternatives. Not because customers are eager to abandon VMware, but because they are being forced to evaluate the cost of staying. In most cases, they want to keep the VMware experience but at a lower price point. They are not looking for radical transformation. They want continuity with less financial pressure.

This creates an opportunity for managed service providers. Customers are looking for partners that can deliver VMware-like services without the new Broadcom pricing model. That might mean using vSphere alternatives like OpenStack or Proxmox. It might mean using another platform entirely. The technical shift is manageable. The real challenge is operational. Customers worry about governance, automation, tooling, and retraining staff.

But timing is critical. Just like we were late to market with hosted mainframes, MSPs that are not already moving to solve this VMware disruption may also be too late. Customers are actively making decisions now. Once they pick a direction, they are not going to look back for a long time.

This moment is not just about choosing between VMware and something else. It is about the broader opportunity to deliver infrastructure as a managed service. Enterprises want simplicity, control over costs, and reliability. They are not looking to become infrastructure experts again.

If you are an MSP, now is the time to act. Don't build for the market as it existed three years ago. Don't wait for perfect platforms. Focus on solving problems that customers are facing today. Otherwise, you might have a great solution that simply showed up too late.