Gartner Says Half of Enterprises Are Ready to Leave VMware. The DHI Market Is the Reason.

What Gartner means by distributed hybrid infrastructure

Gartner published its 2026 Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure on September 10. The category name is a mouthful, but the idea is simple. Distributed hybrid infrastructure is a stack built on cloud-native principles like programmability, elasticity, modularity, and resiliency. It runs wherever the customer wants. On premises, at a colocation, at the edge, or in the public cloud.

The promise is one operating model across all of those places. A single control plane, a consistent set of APIs, and unified policy enforcement. The market exists because running workloads everywhere has become normal, and managing them everywhere has not.

The VMware subtext runs through the whole report

The 2025 edition of this report read as a market in transition, and the theme carries into 2026. Broadcom, which owns VMware, still holds a Leader position. But the report noted that customers were frustrated by the shift from perpetual licensing to subscriptions, by rising costs, and by what Gartner described as deteriorating support experiences.

Gartner’s forward-looking call was blunt. It projected that about half of enterprises would begin proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure products over the following two years, up sharply from a small base in 2024. That forecast is the engine behind the whole market. Vendors are not just competing for new deployments. They are competing for organizations actively looking to reduce or eliminate their reliance on VMware Cloud Foundation.

Nutanix has been the loudest beneficiary. It sits in the Leaders quadrant for a third consecutive year, positioned closest to VMware among the leaders, and it has been open about expecting a steady stream of VMware defectors each quarter. Gartner credited its single-stack approach for avoiding the complexity of integrating separate products. The caution was size, with some buyers worrying that a smaller vendor carries more risk than a hyperscaler.

What the leader lineup tells you about the market

The hyperscalers are all here. AWS, Microsoft, and Oracle join Broadcom and Nutanix in the Leaders quadrant. Each one is pushing its cloud outward. AWS Outposts runs a subset of AWS services on premises and drew praise for supporting data residency and sovereignty needs, though Gartner flagged low awareness among non-AWS users. Microsoft’s Azure Local won credit for centralized control and lifecycle automation. Oracle was noted for sovereign options and an RDMA-based network that suits AI workloads.

Google landed as a Visionary rather than a Leader, and IBM as a Challenger. Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, and Tencent sit as Niche Players. Every vendor in the report is a trademark of its owner, and Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications.

One theme cuts across the field. Sovereignty is now a spectrum, not a checkbox. Some platforms let a customer run a fully autonomous private cloud. Others leave the operator tied to a provider’s control plane. Where a vendor sits on that spectrum increasingly matters as much as raw capability.

The timing matters. The report lands as AI workloads push compute back toward controlled environments for cost, latency, and data reasons. That makes the operating model question more urgent, not less. A team that standardized on one cloud for everything now has to place inference close to data, keep some workloads sovereign, and still give developers one consistent interface. The vendors in this report are selling the answer to that problem, and the VMware exodus is handing them the demand.

The practical read for infrastructure leaders is that this is an operating-model decision, not a spec-sheet comparison. The vendors that win will be the ones that cut complexity across cloud, on-premises, and edge without locking customers into a single provider’s control plane. The VMware disruption opened the door. The distributed hybrid infrastructure market is what is walking through it.

The economics behind this migration wave, including the three year cost model and why exits run long, are in the 2026 State of Enterprise Infrastructure report.

Related reading. The VMware Exit Has a Shortlist. Nutanix Just Took a Front Seat.. Gartner’s Container Grid Names Seven Leaders. Only Two Are Not Hyperscalers.. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management Just Made the AI Shift Official. The 2026 State of Enterprise Infrastructure.