Wintel Infrastructure Engineer

Centorrino bets on SUSE as VMware migration wave gathers pace. 12 Aug 2026 7 mins Plans to move thousands of virtual machine (VM) workloads from VMware to SUSE. Centorrino Technologies (CT) is rolling out SUSE Virtualisation across its hosted infrastructure platform and preparing to migrate thousands of VMware virtual machines, positioning the Australian managed services provider (MSP) to capitalise on growing customer demand for alternatives to incumbent virtualisation platforms. Announced at SUSE Summit in Sydney, the partnership comes as enterprises reassess infrastructure strategies following significant increases in virtualisation licensing costs, creating an opening for partners able to offer migration pathways and modernisation services. CT has already been running SUSE Virtualisation in production and is now extending the platform to customers. The company expects to move thousands of virtual machine (VM) workloads from VMware to SUSE while maintaining enterprise-grade availability, resilience, and support for multi-tenant environments. According to CT CTO Nicholas Iacobucci, the decision was driven by a need for long-term commercial certainty and greater customer control over infrastructure costs. "The licensing cost increases from major technology vendors create real pressure for customers, but also the opportunity for change," he said. "We needed a platform that offered long-term commercial certainty without compromising on enterprise-grade capability." The migration effort has involved building a repeatable framework capable of moving production VM workloads with minimal downtime across hundreds of customer environments. Challenges included maintaining high availability, supporting multi-tenancy, and creating operational processes that could be scaled across CT's customer base. Speaking with ARN, CT CEO Adam Centorrino said the company made a significant investment in the transition, creating a dedicated team to first migrate its own infrastructure before expanding the program to customer environments. "We've gone all in from our perspective," Centorrino said. "We started off by spinning up one team underneath our CTO as the team that would build our internal infrastructure first. Then we migrated our customers' private cloud workloads over and now we're doing that for customers within their own infrastructure as well." Centorrino added that the business absorbed the migration costs for hosted customers. "We didn't charge customers a cent for the migration of anything that was hosted on our cloud environment," he said. "You're talking thousands and thousands of workloads that have to be moved." The move follows an internal evaluation of alternatives including Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, and OpenStack. Centorrino said it ultimately selected SUSE because it wanted a more open and flexible platform without tying virtualisation to a particular hardware stack. Behind the scenes, the project has represented a significant investment for CT in creating a dedicated team to drive the migration and building repeatable processes around project management, workload migration, and customer testing. Project teams have already been trained on SUSE, while business-as-usual infrastructure teams are now being brought up to speed. That investment is intended to create a migration capability CT can offer more broadly as organisations look for alternatives to VMware. SUSE Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) general manager Ben Henshall described CT's deployment as more than a simple infrastructure migration. "Centorrino Technologies now is providing a highly legitimate, highly cost-effective alternative to the big virtualisation vendor in town," he said. "But the story has the Kubernetes part to it, so customers can modernise over time from a containerisation perspective without having to do this massive shift all at once." According to Henshall, CT now has a platform capable of supporting traditional virtual machines alongside containerised workloads through Kubernetes while maintaining a common management layer. He said customers could use the platform to manage environments spanning on-premises infrastructure as well as cloud environments running services such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). "That gets very powerful," Henshall said. "Adam's got the ability to go and extend that without having to build yet another siloed infrastructure stack." Industrial edge emerges as growth market. Beyond virtualisation, SUSE is increasingly targeting industrial edge opportunities across Australia and New Zealand, particularly in sectors such as mining, manufacturing, logistics, utilities and maritime, SUSE VP and GM edge business unit, Keith Basil highlighted. "If you think conceptually about a ship as a vessel, we are at every layer of the ship in terms of manufacturing, system controls, navigation and, for some of our cruise ship customers, Kubernetes is supplying the passenger applications and services on the ship," Basil said. Basil said Australia's economy makes it particularly well suited to industrial edge adoption. Henshall pointed out that while many enterprise workloads have already been transformed through traditional cloud migrations, industries built around physical operations remain largely untapped. "Out into the edge, out into the world of things, of stuff, physics, disconnected networks, hard-to-reach places, warehouses, trains, planes and water - that's where we see the next frontier," he said. "By luck or sheer brilliance, SUSE has got a platform that extends beautifully to that edge operational technology space." Basil said SUSE's strategy is built around combining expertise across Linux, Kubernetes, cloud-native infrastructure, security, and operational technology. The company's acquisition of industrial internet of things (IoT) platform provider Losant earlier this year has been central to that vision. "We understand Kubernetes and cloud native, we understand Linux from our heritage, we understand security from all layers of the stack and with the acquisition of Losant we now have the OT component that synergistically blends into that whole thing," Basil said. "I don't see any other company with those pieces on the table." Channel focus. SUSE's broader proposition centres on providing a common operating model across data centres, public clouds and edge environments. SUSE AI VP and GM Rhys Oxenham said it was focused on delivering consistency regardless of where workloads run. "SUSE is laser focused on building a platform that, regardless of where you run it, whether it's in the data centre, in the public cloud or at the edge, provides a consistent fabric," Oxenham said. "The same user experience, tooling and security focus." He added that the architecture is designed to support multiple workload types, including bare-metal applications, virtual machines, containers, and AI workloads. For Henshall, that unified approach represents a significant opportunity for Australian partners and customers grappling with rising infrastructure costs while also looking to invest in AI. "We have a major productivity issue. Organisations are trying to free up money so they can tackle this new thing called AI," he said. "SUSE can be the counter-lever to that. We can reduce costs and give customers a platform that supports tomorrow's problems today." SUSE is also sharpening its partner strategy around solution-based offerings rather than traditional software resale. Henshall said it was looking to work more closely with partners that can build intellectual property and services around specific customer challenges, citing CT as a prime example. Meanwhile, Basil urged Australian systems integrators and specialised industry partners to engage with the company around industrial edge opportunities. "We're looking to partner with people," Basil said. "We see either a regional or industry-specific systems integrator as our main partner because those companies have the domain expertise. We want to give them the software as an enablement piece for them to cultivate the entire business behind it." Don't miss a thing From its editors straight to your inbox. Get started by entering your email address below. Editor ARN | Reseller News With years of experience covering the latest technology trends and business news across the IT channel, Julia Talevski has been keeping the IT industry connected in Australia and New Zealand. She is currently the editor for ARN and Reseller News, responsible for keeping the community engaged at every touch point through its newsletters, websites and main events such as EDGE, WIICTA and Innovation Awards.

SUSE partners with Centorrino Technologies to replace VMware across enterprise infrastructure. SUSE | Published 12 Aug 2026 New partnership offers Australian enterprises a cost-effective virtualisation path, after Centorrino Technologies (CT) avoided significant cost increases on its own infrastructure, as major vendors raise prices SUSE(R), a global leader in innovative, open and secure enterprise-grade solutions, today announced that Centorrino Technologies (CT), a full-service ICT solutions and cyber security provider, has selected SUSE Virtualisation as a replacement to VMware across its hosted infrastructure platform - avoiding significant cost increases on CT's current services once completed. Having run in production for some time, the platform is now ready to be rolled out to customers, with CT set to move thousands of Virtual Machine (VM) instances from VMware to SUSE Virtualisation - driven by significant savings in licensing and subscription costs, and futureproofing the platform's viability and affordability. The move also addresses a range of technical challenges CT was facing, including migrating production VM workloads with minimal downtime, supporting multi-tenant hosting environments and maintaining enterprise-grade availability and resilience. Central to this has been establishing a repeatable migration framework capable of scaling across hundreds of customer environments. By adopting SUSE Virtualisation, CT and its customers gain access to an enterprise-grade platform built on open source technologies, reducing reliance on proprietary licensing while maintaining the availability and resilience their environments demand. The solution lowers long-term infrastructure costs, reduces vendor lock-in by transitioning to a more open platform and enables customers to modernise workloads without significant disruption to business operations. "What Centorrino Technologies has built is a strong example of how partners and end users are responding to the shifting economics of enterprise virtualisation," said Ben Henshall, General Manager, Australia and New Zealand at SUSE. "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." CT serves government agencies, defence and intelligence sectors, financial and professional service organisations, healthcare providers and schools throughout Australia. For these customers, having a locally owned and run managed service provider that delivers sovereignty, commercial certainty, security and service continuity is critical for Australian government agencies and businesses alike. "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, that ensures our customers keep control of their infrastructure and their 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. With more than 20 years' experience delivering a suite of professional services such as infrastructure assessments, migration projects, cloud modernisation initiatives and managed hosting offerings, CT has bolstered its capability with a well-established process to support other organisations seeking to move across to SUSE at scale. CT plans to expand adoption of SUSE technologies across its hosted infrastructure platform and customer environments, building repeatable migration methodologies, operational processes and managed service offerings designed to support enterprise organisations considering large-scale migration programmes throughout Australia.