Sangfor Technologies focused on helping Malaysian businesses deal with complexities in VMware renewals

"This creates a strong opportunity for Sangfor to help Malaysian customers simplify infrastructure through HCI, virtualization, storage, backup, cybersecurity, and managed cloud solutions,” says Keith Lee, Cloud Business Director at Sangfor Technologies.

As Malaysian organizations move towards AI deployment, one hurdle that is slowing them down is their infrastructure. While most Malaysian organizations do not have heavy legacy infrastructure, there is still a significant number of organizations in the country that are needing to deal with their existing infrastructure before they can really move into deploying their AI use cases.

According to Sangfor Technologies, many Malaysian enterprises are reaching a critical "refresh" point for their data center infrastructure. The significant shift toward subscription-only models and bundled licensing is prompting CIOs to re-evaluate the long-term cost and flexibility of their virtualization stacks.

The cybersecurity and cloud vendor also highlighted that enterprises in Malaysia are also having to deal with their VMware subscription bundles- when Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023 especially with changes made to the VMware’s programs eliminating perpetual licenses and moving entirely to a subscription-based licensing model. Even more significant is the steep increase in minimum licensing requirements.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Keith Lee, Cloud Business Director at Sangfor Technologies discusses what are the challenges and opportunities the vendor is seeing in Malaysia as well as the impact of the VMware renewal dilemma businesses are facing in the country. Lee also discusses Sangfor’s partner ecosystem in the country and important roles partners play in enabling customers in their AI journey.

What are the challenges and opportunities Sangfor is seeing in Malaysia?

Malaysia is moving strongly towards cloud, data center, cybersecurity, and AI-driven digitalization. According to DOSM, Malaysia’s ICT and e-commerce sector contributed 23.4% of the national economy, or RM451.3 billion, in 2024. This shows how important digital infrastructure has become to the country’s economy. (Department of Statistics Malaysia)

At the same time, many organizations are facing pressure from rising software renewal costs, hardware costs, cybersecurity risks, and limited IT manpower. This creates a strong opportunity for Sangfor to help Malaysian customers simplify infrastructure through HCI, virtualization, storage, backup, cybersecurity, and managed cloud solutions.

To directly address these challenges, Sangfor is stepping in to modernize how Malaysian enterprises approach migration. Traditionally, manual migration demands extensive engineering hours, complex dependency mapping, and heavy professional services costs. We are changing this narrative by automating these critical, repetitive workflows. By relieving local IT teams of intense manual overhead, organizations can transition workloads seamlessly while reducing total migration labour costs by up to 80%.

Furthermore, we recognize that a prolonged migration timeline can severely inflate total project costs, even if the target platform seems budget-friendly on paper. Hence, by compressing data payloads by up to 70%, it dramatically accelerates execution times and minimizes network strain. This faster execution drastically shortens the coexistence period between legacy and new environments, allowing Malaysian businesses to achieve a stable, cost-optimized infrastructure with maximum speed and minimum disruption.

In terms of the VMware renewal crisis, how much of an impact is that to Malaysian businesses?

The impact is significant, especially for enterprises that have standardized on VMware for many years. Globally, many customers are reviewing their VMware strategy due to the move towards subscription licensing, bundled packages, and higher renewal pressure. Some reports indicate that many enterprises have experienced notable renewal cost increases after Broadcom’s VMware acquisition.

This global anxiety is clearly reflected in recent market data. According to a Gartner sentiment poll on Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, more than 60% of respondents expressed negative feelings and serious concerns regarding the acquisition, with none having a fully positive outlook. The data highlights that these anxieties are driven directly by anticipated price increases, Broadcom’s business practices, potential impacts on long-term product innovation, and disruptive changes in licensing that affect existing contracts.

In Malaysia, we see the same concern. The issue is not only price. It also affects budget planning, procurement approval, future scalability, and vendor lock-in. Many customers who previously renewed automatically are now asking whether they should continue, optimize, or migrate.

More companies are migrating away from VMware due to renewal costs. Is that rampant in Malaysia too? How is Sangfor facilitating this?

Yes, the trend is visible in Malaysia, although it is more accurate to describe it as “active evaluation” rather than sudden mass migration. Enterprise infrastructure decisions take time.

Customers are now comparing total cost of ownership, licensing model, ecosystem support, migration risk, and long-term roadmap. Sangfor supports this through assessment, sizing, POC, migration planning, local partner delivery, and post-sales support.

For some customers, Sangfor can become the main virtualization and HCI platform. For others, we may support a hybrid strategy where VMware remains for certain critical workloads while Sangfor is used for expansion, DR, branch sites, or new digital projects.

Is migrating from VMware the best option for Malaysian businesses? Why so?

Not for every customer, and not always immediately. For mission-critical systems, migration should be carefully assessed and phased.

However, for customers facing high renewal cost, limited budget flexibility, or concern over long-term vendor dependency, it is a good time to evaluate alternatives. A practical approach is to start with selected workloads such as new projects, DR environments, branch workloads, development and testing, or non-critical production systems.

Sangfor helps customers assess their current VMware environment, run proof-of-concept testing, validate performance and reliability, and design a phased migration roadmap. The goal is to reduce risk while giving customers more choices.

Can you tell us a bit about your partner ecosystem in Malaysia and how they are supporting Sangfor and customers?

Sangfor is a partner-driven organization. We work with system integrators, managed service providers, cloud service providers, security partners, and industry-focused resellers. Since establishing our presence in Kuala Lumpur in 2010, we have grown this ecosystem to include over 800+ local channel partners across the country.

Our partners support customers across the full lifecycle, including consultation, solution design, proof-of-concept, implementation, migration, managed services, and support. This is important in Malaysia because many customers prefer working with trusted local partners who understand their industry, procurement process, and support expectations.

How is Sangfor enabling local partners to support customer needs?

We enable partners through technical training, certification, joint workshops, POC support, migration guidance, and direct access to Sangfor’s local and regional technical teams.

For VMware alternative opportunities, we also provide sizing tools, migration frameworks, competitive positioning, and best-practice guides. This helps partners move beyond product selling and provide higher-value services such as assessment, migration planning, implementation, and lifecycle support.

Lastly, what does the future look like for Sangfor Technologies in Malaysia?

We are very positive about Sangfor’s future in Malaysia. The country is becoming a stronger digital and cloud hub in Southeast Asia. MIDA has reported RM144.4 billion in approved data center and cloud computing investments between 2021 and mid-2025, which reflects strong demand for digital infrastructure. (MIDA)

For Sangfor, Malaysia will continue to be an important market. We will focus on VMware alternatives, HCI, Enterprise virtualization, hybrid cloud, AI-storage, backup and disaster recovery, cybersecurity, AI-ready infrastructure, and managed cloud services.

Our local momentum perfectly aligns with our soaring regional and global trajectory. According to the latest Gartner Market Share report, Sangfor has officially been ranked among the Top 5 largest Hyperconverged Integrated System (HCIS) vendors by revenue across the entire Asia-Pacific region, capturing a commanding 12.29% regional market share. Furthermore, as an international leader in enterprise cloud infrastructure, Sangfor has already successfully helped more than 12,000 organizations worldwide migrate away from VMware onto our modern, unified platforms.

Our vision is to become a trusted long-term technology partner for Malaysian organizations by helping them reduce IT complexity, improve security, and build a more flexible digital foundation.