What we heard in Vienna and why Vates is investing in DACH

A few weeks ago, our newly appointed Chief Commercial Officer Nicolas Leblanc and our seasoned Sales Manager Eduardo Trejos were in Vienna, alongside with our partner, sovereign AI and IT infrastructure vendor, Bull, hosted by LB Systems for Datacenter Trends. It was a small event, a hundred visitors at most. We didn't go there to harvest leads. We went to listen.

What we heard confirmed something we've been observing for months: the conversation among DACH IT leaders has shifted. Two years after the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, the question is no longer whether to look at alternatives. It's how, when, and to what. And it's no longer just a cost conversation.

This article is a quick read of where the DACH market stands today, what's driving the shift, and why, starting this month, Vates is putting more weight behind this region.

What's actually changing in DACH

The post-VMware fatigue is real, and it's not new. What's new is the pattern of how it's now being addressed.

A few signals from the last twelve months that frame the context:

• The Austrian Federal Ministry announced its migration from Microsoft to Nextcloud (a tool that we are using internally at Vates already) in late 2025, with ripple effects across other ministries.
• NIS2 entered enforcement in Germany in December 2025, with the first concrete actions expected this year.
• AWS launched its European Sovereign Cloud in Brandenburg in January 2026, a clear signal that even US hyperscalers feel the need to reframe their European positioning.
• Deutsche Telekom T Cloud Public continues to expand, targeting full hyperscaler parity by year-end.

All of these events are the visible markers of something deeper: digital sovereignty has moved from being a defense and public-sector concern to a procurement criterion in mainstream private-sector RFPs as healthcare, finance, energy and manufacturing.

What we heard from attendees in Vienna

The conversations Nicolas and Eduardo had on the booth and around our joint talk with Bull echoed what we see in our broader pipeline, but with a few DACH-specific notes worth sharing.

Frustration with Broadcom pricing is still the entry point. Several participants mentioned pricing increases, but more interestingly, they mentioned uncertainty about Broadcom's long-term strategy. Beyond the financial discomfort, there is a concern about predictability.

Vendor lock-in is now an explicit concern. Five years ago, this was a talking point. Today, attendees were raising it spontaneously, as a present constraint they want to engineer their way out of.

Sovereignty is moving from political discussion to infrastructure requirement. Several attendees raised concerns about long-term dependence on non-European technology vendors, particularly for critical infrastructure. While cost and functionality still drive most purchasing decisions, the ability to build on technologies developed, supported, and governed in Europe is becoming an increasingly important factor in platform evaluations.

Hardware refresh cycles are triggering virtualization reviews. This was probably the most actionable insight. Customers planning their next hardware refresh are using that moment to reconsider their virtualization stack at the same time. The two decisions used to be independent. They're not anymore.

One nuance worth naming: enterprise workloads still create hesitation. Oracle, SAP, and similar workloads are perceived as tightly tied to VMware certification ecosystems. Even customers who want to move feel locked in by certification dependencies, not technical ones. This is real, and it deserves to be addressed honestly rather than dismissed.

The certification question doesn't have a shortcut. But it's exactly where our work on ecosystem partnerships is focused, and it's why, earlier this year, we launched the Vates Alliance Network (VAN).

The VAN is our structured answer to the reality that customers don't deploy products, they deploy complete solutions: hypervisor + hardware + storage + backup + security + the services that operate them. The VAN brings technology partners together to make sure those combinations are tested, documented, and ready to deploy in production and not in theory.

Why this matters for the European stack conversation

When we presented with Bull in Vienna, the title of the talk was From Metal to Cloud: European. Zero Dependencies. Zero Lock-in. A fair description of what's now actually available for our users.

Sovereignty doesn't stop at the software layer. The hardware your VMs run on, the supply chain behind it, the firmware that boots the system, the factory where the rack was built, every layer is part of the equation. This is where the Bull–Vates combination becomes interesting:

• Bull designs and manufactures BullSequana servers in Angers, France, an end-to-end industrial site that delivers 1,200 racks, 20,000 servers, and 160,000 GPUs annually, with full integration, test, and validation on European soil. Bull has formalized this into a Sovereignty Score, evaluating each use-case across design, build, run, and security dimensions. Vates VMS on BullSequana SH solution scores A+
• Vates provides the virtualization layer, XCP-ng, Xen Orchestra, XOSTOR, 100% open source, auditable, with a per-host pricing model and no socket counting. We've been at this since 2012, we're co-stewards of the Xen hypervisor (the same engine that powers AWS EC2), and we're one of the few European players in the Gartner Market Guide for Server Virtualization three years running.

Together, you get a stack where you can answer the sovereignty question for each layer, with the same precision your auditors and procurement teams are starting to demand.

"For us, sovereignty isn't a marketing claim, it's a measurable engineering discipline applied at every layer of the system. Combining BullSequana with the Vates virtualization stack gives our customers a continuous, auditable European foundation, from the server firmware to the orchestration layer."

– Yann Spydevold, Head of Business Development Central Europe, Bull

What we're putting behind this in DACH

Three concrete moves, starting now:

1. A dedicated Sales Manager for DACH joins Vates in July. Until now, we've covered the region from our Grenoble HQ and through partners. The volume and quality of conversations we're now having justifies a dedicated, regionally embedded presence, someone who speaks the language, knows the integrators and understand the users' expectation.

2. A reinforced partnership with Bull across Central Europe. The Vienna talk was one waypoint in a broader collaboration. Expect more joint reference architectures, more co-presence at regional events, and more shared customer pilots in the coming months.

3. Continued investment in the ecosystem. Vates is profitable, customer-funded, and growing 3× over the past two years, with 90% of new customers since 2023 coming from VMware. It's a long-term commitment to a region where the conditions for a European alternative are now genuinely aligned.

Where this goes next

If you're a CIO, infrastructure lead, or architect in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland reckoning with what comes after VMware, and especially if you're in a hardware refresh window, we'd like to talk. We would like to understand your constraints and share what we've seen working elsewhere.

You can reach our team directly using our contact form, or follow our work on Linkedin. If you'd like a technical demo of Xen Orchestra and a walk-through you can also ask for a demo here.

We'll be back in the region this year. Looking forward to the conversations