‘I think every customer that wants to participate in all of the magic of AI, first and foremost, needs to be migrated to the cloud,’ Microsoft Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen tells CRN. ‘That is absolutely the call to action for all of our partners.’
Microsoft Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen said Monday that the tech giant is expanding incentives for partners to migrate customers from VMware platforms to its Azure cloud services for the new fiscal year.
“We absolutely are investing more in VMware migrations this year, and I think every customer that wants to participate in all of the magic of AI, first and foremost, needs to be migrated to the cloud,” she said in an interview with CRN.
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“That is absolutely the call to action for all of our partners,” she added.
Dezen said the increased investments in VMware migrations are part of a broader boost in partner funding that the Redmond, Wash.-based company announced Tuesday for the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program in its 2026 fiscal year, which began this month.
While she didn’t say how much more Microsoft is investing in VMware migration incentives for partners this year, Dezen disclosed in a blog post a 20 percent year-on-year boost in enterprise customer investment funds, which includes allocations for migrations.
Microsoft is among several vendors looking to convince customers to move away from VMware in the face of continuing changes, including price increases and partner program shake-ups, that its parent company, Broadcom, has made to the virtualization giant since it acquired the company in late 2023 for $69 billion.
“There’s definitely a lot of folks that, with new [VMware’s] new pricing, are looking to go explore what the alternatives are,” said Chris Bogan, vice president of sales at Houston, Texas-based systems integrator Mark III Systems, which is a long-time partner of both VMware and Microsoft.
Since many customers have existing Microsoft agreements, the tech giant is a “pretty reasonable” option to consider, according to Bogan.
However, he said, moving to the cloud has been a non-starter for customers who require on-premises data centers for security reasons.
“It’s just all about what the security requirements of the organization are,” Bogan said.
Dezen said Microsoft recently started a new initiative to drive VMware migrations called Azure Accelerate, which combines “all of the assets and incentives that partners need not only to migrate customers to the cloud but then also to enable all of their AI needs for the future.”
“The benefit to a customer to move their all of their services and solutions to Azure is you truly get the one-stop shop, and we have a wealth of partner capability designed to meet customer needs across their entire stack, from infrastructure, to their apps and services, to data and AI, and, of course, all encompassed by market-leading security,” she said.
Michael Goldstein, CEO of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Microsoft gold partner LAN InfoTech, said he thinks it’s good for Microsoft to put more resources into VMware migration opportunities, especially since he’s seeing some customers who aren’t yet sure what to do with second-tier workloads that are still residing in VMware virtual machines.
“We see some of the left-behind VMs that are out there. That’s the projects that we have going on: things that they didn’t know what to do with,” he said.
Customers who have started to move their workloads to Azure from VMware have already been impressed with what they’ve seen, according to Goldstein.
“We found a lot of VMware customers dip their foot into Azure, and they realize, ‘Wow, this is pretty amazing.’ And I think they’re just looking to bring the rest over,” he said.
Another factor for many customers looking at cloud platforms like Azure is uptime, including in situations where weather can impact local data centers, the solution provider CEO said.
“In South Florida, we’re getting bombarded [by storms], so I think a lot of people are starting to think that finally the cloud is the way to go,” Goldstein said.