Bruce Busansky, Application Platform Specialist, Red Hat

If your virtualization vendor just changed its licensing terms, you are probably staring at a bigger bill and a shorter runway to decide what comes next. The platform you choose in response will shape how your team operates for years, not just what you pay this quarter.

Two buyers, one underlying requirement

In my conversations with IT leaders across Sub-Saharan Africa, I see two kinds of buyers. The first wants to move off their current platform as fast as possible. Their questions are about migration timelines, business continuity and staying within budget. The second wants to use the move as a chance to modernise. Their questions are about target architecture, and increasingly, about where artificial intelligence (AI) workloads will run.

These buyers look different on the surface, but they are converging on the same requirement: a platform that does not force a choice between running virtual machines (VMs) well and running containers well. In Red Hat's 2025 State of virtualization report, 89% of IT leaders said combining virtualization, containers and automation on one platform speeds up development, and 85% were already running a hybrid cloud model, split between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud. Neither buyer can afford a platform that only does half the job.

What consolidating onto one platform actually solves

This is where the conversation usually gets vague, so let me be specific about the payoff, without getting lost in the plumbing.

A modern, unified architecture allows enterprise teams to run legacy virtual machines alongside containerised applications on the same underlying infrastructure. Instead of maintaining two distinct management stacks, operations teams gain a single control plane for visibility, security, and administration, using unified options like Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as a practical foundation.

That sounds simple, but it removes a real cost most companies underestimate: running a separate infrastructure stack for VMs and another for containers means two sets of tools, two sets of processes and often two separate teams who rarely talk to each other. Consolidating onto one platform collapses that into a single operation, with one place to see what is running, one place to secure it and one team accountable for it.