11:11 Systems has acquired select IBM VMware Cloud Service Provider enterprise customers, expanding its global VMware business as Broadcom concentrates more of its cloud ecosystem around a smaller group of service providers.
The deal, announced Oct. 8, spans customers across North America, EMEA, APAC and South America and marks 11:11’s eighth VMware-related transaction and 11th acquisition overall. Financial terms were not disclosed.
For 11:11, the acquisition brings another enterprise customer base onto its global cloud platform while creating opportunities to sell additional infrastructure, data protection, networking and security services around those VMware environments.
“We are always focused on opportunities where we can take a very mature customer base and allow them to modernize to our platform,” CEO Brett Diamond told Channel Insider.
11:11 builds on VMware acquisition strategy
The IBM transaction follows a series of acquisitions that have steadily expanded 11:11’s VMware footprint, including iland Cloud, Green Cloud Defense, Unitas Global, Sungard Availability Services, Faction, Ntirety and Digital Sense.
Channel Insider reported in January that 11:11’s acquisition of Ntirety was part of the provider’s strategy to expand within the VMware ecosystem as Broadcom refined its VCSP program. The subsequent Digital Sense acquisition expanded that strategy further into APAC.
IBM customers bring new migration opportunities
The IBM deal brings additional scale but also a different migration challenge: moving large enterprise workloads without forcing customers into an immediate replatforming effort.
CTO Justin Giardina said 11:11 has dedicated service delivery resources for the IBM customer migrations, building on its experience using replication and disaster recovery technologies to move workloads into its cloud.
“All customers aren’t created equal,” Giardina said. “We have some customers who are very easy, bread-and-butter type of migrations, to some customers that are going to be a little bit more challenging.”
Once migrated, Giardina said customers can layer additional backup, disaster recovery, networking and security capabilities around their VMware workloads.
VMware Cloud Foundation expands partner opportunity
The transaction also comes as 11:11 invests in VMware Cloud Foundation following Broadcom’s continued expansion of the platform.
At VMware Explore 2026, Broadcom positioned VCF as an infrastructure layer for private AI, containers, security and traditional enterprise workloads. 11:11 executives told Channel Insider after the event that those capabilities could expand partner opportunities around modernization, managed services and private AI.
For 11:11’s channel partners, that broadening VCF stack is more than a VMware infrastructure opportunity. Partners can potentially attach modernization, managed services, backup and disaster recovery, networking, security and private AI services as customers move onto 11:11’s platform.
CRO Dante Orsini said the newly acquired IBM customers could also now access those capabilities alongside 11:11’s existing services and their ongoing relationship with IBM.
“Being able to meet these customers where they are in their journey, to modernize applications, whether they’re going from running virtual machines or running containers or even running private AI workloads,” creates value for both customers and partners, Orsini said.
11:11 remains committed to VMware amid ecosystem changes
The acquisition underscores 11:11’s decision to move deeper into VMware, even after years of licensing and partner program disruptions following Broadcom’s acquisition.
Broadcom said the transaction aligns with its strategy of relying on providers with the operational and technical scale to support enterprise VMware environments. The company pointed to 11:11’s global platform, VMware experience and more than 6,000 customers as reasons it is positioned to support those workloads.
11:11, meanwhile, is making clear it does not view VMware as simply one virtualization option among many.
“We are 100% invested in the program,” Diamond said. “We do not really support other hypervisors.”
Giardina acknowledged that the VMware ecosystem has required partners to adapt to significant licensing, program and technology changes. But after that disruption, he believes VCF now gives providers more room to differentiate through services and their own intellectual property.
“As the smoke and the dust continues to settle, and things get a little bit easier in the industry or a little bit less noisy in the industry,” Giardina said, “it allows us to focus on being that number one provider and having the IP around our services that really make us attract these customers.”