Centorrino swaps VMware for SUSE to cut hosting costs

Centorrino Technologies is replacing VMware across its hosted infrastructure platform with SUSE Virtualisation to avoid higher costs associated with VMware under Broadcom.

The Australian technology provider has already been running the platform in production and is now preparing for a broader customer rollout. That phase is expected to involve migrating thousands of virtual machine instances from VMware to SUSE Virtualisation across customer environments.

The project reflects a broader response from infrastructure providers and enterprise users to changes in licensing and subscription costs in the virtualisation market. For Centorrino Technologies, the work involved more than replacing one platform with another. It also had to migrate production workloads with minimal interruption, support multi-tenant hosting arrangements and maintain service availability.

A key part of the effort has been creating a repeatable migration framework for use across hundreds of customer environments. The process is intended to move workloads at scale while keeping disruption low.

Migration plan

Centorrino Technologies provides managed services and infrastructure to customers in government, defence, intelligence, financial services, professional services, healthcare and education across Australia. As a result, any infrastructure change must account for operational continuity, as well as security and hosting requirements.

The move also gives the company a more open-source-based path for its hosted infrastructure. That reduces reliance on proprietary licensing models at a time when many organisations are reviewing long-term vendor dependence and budget exposure.

Ben Henshall, general manager for Australia and New Zealand at SUSE, said the deal reflected growing demand for alternatives in enterprise virtualisation.

"What Centorrino Technologies has built is a strong example of how partners and end users are responding to the shifting economics of enterprise virtualisation," Henshall said.

"Organisations are actively looking for alternatives, and we're seeing that demand grow across both our partner and customer base. This migration demonstrates what's possible when you combine open, enterprise-grade technology with a partner that knows how to deliver it at scale."

While VMware remains widely used in enterprise data centres, customers and service providers have been reassessing their options since Broadcom completed its takeover and changed product packaging and licensing. That has created openings for alternative virtualisation platforms, particularly those built around open-source software.

Centorrino Technologies said economics were central to its decision, but it also framed the shift as an issue of commercial control. Customers, it said, wanted to reduce the risk of being tied to pricing decisions made by a single vendor.

"The licensing cost increases from major technology vendors create real pressure for customers, but also the opportunity for change. We needed a platform that offered long-term commercial certainty without compromising on enterprise-grade capability and that ensures our customers keep control of their infrastructure and costs, rather than being exposed to a single vendor's pricing decisions. SUSE Virtualisation gave us that, and it has allowed us to build a migration practice that solves a problem we are seeing right across the market," said Nicholas Iacobucci, chief technology officer at Centorrino Technologies.

Customer impact

Beyond its own infrastructure, Centorrino Technologies is positioning the migration process as a service for other organisations considering a move away from VMware. Drawing on more than two decades of experience in infrastructure assessments, migration work, cloud modernisation and managed hosting, it has built operational processes around the transition that it now plans to apply more broadly.

That matters in sectors where migration risk often slows technology change. Customers in government and regulated industries typically need evidence that a new platform can support resilience, security and continuity before moving core workloads.

Centorrino Technologies is also a locally owned managed service provider with an onshore team, a factor that can carry weight with public sector and regulated customers concerned about data handling and operational control. The company holds a range of Australian security and certification credentials, including IRAP assessment, Hosting Certification Framework PROTECTED certification, DISP certification and ISO 27001 certification.

The migration effort highlights how cost pressure in core infrastructure software is reshaping decisions once driven mainly by technical standardisation. In this case, the outcome is a shift by one Australian provider to a new virtualisation stack that it says can be repeated across a large installed base of customer environments.