Congratulations Broadcom and VMware. While you haven’t knocked AI completely out of the news, you have at least grabbed a sizeable share of the IT headlines in recent weeks. Unfortunately for you, most of your headlines were negative.

VMware is under attack from many fronts. Long-time rival Nutanix dedicated its annual Next conference last week to showing why it’s a better virtualization choice than VMware. Nutanix even enlisted long-time VMware ally Pure Storage by engaging in a partnership. A few weeks before that, Veeam – created to back up VMware virtual machines – featured speakers claiming they had migrated off VMware or were considering it at its VeeamOn conference. VMware has fired its own shots – at customers and partners, changing their channel programs and telling customers they have to drop perpetual pricing in favor of subscriptions.

Still, Broadcom’s strategy for VMware has been successful. VMware’s stickiness is its strength. The largest VMware customers are moving to subscriptions as Broadcom wants. Many VMware customers so far would rather stick around while investigating options. Meanwhile, rivals and even friends will continue to turn up the heat.

Here is how Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami put it:

“There are many customers out there renewing their VMware contracts because you have to plan for it in advance. It takes time for them to migrate. We've seen a number of successful migrations, but at the same time there are also customers who are renewing with Broadcom even today because they haven't done enough [planning].”

Nutanix is taking the long view, wooing MSPs by trying to show them Nutanix offers a better chance of profitability, product, long-term commitment and trust than VMware. Nutanix is building up its partner ecosystem, both among MSPs and tech vendors.

After adding support for Dell external storage last year, Nutanix is adding integration with Pure Storage’s FlashArray and FlashStack storage. Nutanix also began an Enterprise AI initiative with Nvidia, the favorite AI partner among tech vendors. Nutanix senior vice president Lee Caswell said the partnerships proved Nutanix’s vision “that HCI and external storage will coexist for years.”

Nutanix brought out customers who have already migrated off VMware. So did Veeam at VeeamON. The California Angels spoke of switching from VMware Site Recovery Manager to Veeam with the help of MSP Dataprise. Construction material company Vulcan Materials migrated more than 1,400 VMs from Veeam to Microsoft Hyper-V rather than pay a 250% renewal price increase.

Despite all these examples, Broadcom’s VMware revenue still grows. VMware is part of Broadcom’s infrastructure software division that increased sales 47% year-over-year to $6.7 billion last quarter. And Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said on the earnings call that 70% of his largest 10,000 customers have adopted VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) that includes VMware VSphere.

To get more customers to switch to its subscription licenses, Broadcom sent cease-and-desist notices to VMware users threatening to end support services if they did not switch to subscriptions immediately. Broadcom is also telling channel partners they need to get on board with its private cloud strategy by emphasizing VCF. Those who don’t “will struggle to find a place in the Broadcom partner ecosystem,” according to May 5 blog post by VCF senior vice president Krish Prasad.

So will the bulk of VMware’s large customers stick it out because it’s hard and expensive to switch, or will they jump to the competitors looking to swoop in? That bears closely watching over the next year or so. At least it’s something to keep an eye on besides AI.