Service providers are seeing a once-in-a-decade opportunity in cloud rebalancing

The post-Broadcom Inc. shockwave is creating a cloud rebalancing opportunity, and service providers are racing to capitalize on it.

The disruption is compounding as Broadcom’s consolidation of its VMware partner base leaves many service providers searching for new platform options. Nutanix Inc. is moving to fill that gap with its newly announced Service Provider Central offering and expanded Elevate program, according to Sachin Chheda (pictured, left), vice president of strategic partnerships, service providers and system integrators, at Nutanix.

“Broadcom has disenfranchised quite a few of these service providers out there. They have essentially consolidated their base to a very small subset of partners, and a lot of the partners that were disenfranchised have no other option,” Chheda told theCUBE. “They have to go figure out what should they do to continue running their businesses. For them, it’s almost an existential challenge that they have to look at.”

Chheda and Bryan Smith (right), chief executive officer of Expedient Holdings USA LLC, spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik at Nutanix .NEXT, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed cloud rebalancing strategies and how the Nutanix platform is enabling service providers to capture displaced VMware customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud rebalancing and AI drive the service provider opportunity

The infrastructure-or-AI debate is over. Enterprises now want both, blended together and delivering measurable outcomes, according to Smith. Winning service providers are those that can deliver infrastructure as a service alongside managed AI — and the numbers are bearing that out as Nutanix’s service provider ecosystem expands. Expedient, a managed infrastructure and AI services provider operating on the Nutanix platform, dramatically grew its new client base in the past year, with AI-as-a-service leads now spilling over into broader infrastructure deals.

“Just in the last year, we doubled the number of new logos that we average as a company, and those were just from AI-as-a-service first, and now we’re seeing them bleed over into the infrastructure,” Smith said. “Having a unified platform that can do all the different components really helps accelerate from our side because we’re not developing technology, we’re curators of technology.”

Migration speed is becoming a competitive differentiator. Expedient has completed more than 400 migrations in the past year with only a single rollback from first attempt, Smith noted. Once customers migrate, data becomes the foundation for expanding into AI-enabled workflows and cloud rebalancing, where workloads are matched to the right environment rather than defaulting to hyperscale.

“People view hyperscale often to be [that] they’re buying optionality, they’re buying flexibility, but most companies’ workloads are fairly consistent,” Smith said. “On those consistent workloads, a private cloud environment is going to be 30% less expensive generally but also much faster overall to deploy.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Nutanix .NEXT 2026:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT 2026. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE