VMware Partners Offer Hot Takes on New Acquisitions, Cloud Direction

(Pictured above: VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger on stage at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, Aug. 26.)

VMWARE VMWORLD — It’s an exciting time to be a VMware partner given the continued flushing out of the company’s vision with a flurry of announcements, the recently announced Pivotal and Carbon Black acquisitions, and big changes to the vendor’s Partner Connect program.

On Day 1 of VMworld, Channel Futures caught up with a couple of VMware partners to find out about VMware in their business and their take on the show so far.

First, we chatted with Ross Peterson, solutions architect with Redapt, located near Seattle. Redapt is a systems integrator and VMware Cloud Provider (VCP). The partner employs about 300 people who help customers bridge the gap between on-premises infrastructure and cloud. It also offers hybrid cloud solutions.

Redapt’s Ross Peterson

“We do rack buildouts and I help do the integration of VMware and, also scaling out and migrating to the cloud so that we can offer an end to end hybrid cloud or multicloud solutions,” said Peterson.

He’s very happy about where VMware is headed.

“It’s awesome, quite frankly,” he said. “I have a lot of customers interested in a multicloud environment. They have VMware on premises, Azure in the cloud, also AWS — nothing is talking to each other and customers are wanting that capability. They want to manage everything from a single pane and be able to have everything integrate. From what I heard in the keynote, that’s a very promising direction for VMware.”

Up until now, integration is a headache.

“I have one customer who had a VMware-as-a-service hosting facility and that facility is closing. They also have public cloud infrastructure in Azure — this is about a year ago. They asked what they’ll be able to do, given that they have to move from that third-party colocation, and due to regulations and their clients, it had to be VMware from a business and governance perspective.”

The customer looked at AWS, but with an existing footprint in Azure, they wanted to keep it in Azure given that’s what they know.

“This was before VMware had their VMware offering in Azure, which is something they now have. So, now that it’s general availability, we’re working with the customer to get that migrated, using native VMware tools. That is a big benefit for our customers,” said Peterson.

Redapt customers tend to range from midsize to enterprise businesses.

Peterson couldn’t comment on changes being made to Partner Connect because of a delayed flight. But learning more about the overhaul of Partner Connect, it’s something he and his company are interested in learning more about.

What he is clear about already is how VMware is moving forward.

“It’s what I hoped to hear, honestly — the interoperability across clouds. Customers are in a very sticky situation because they’ll isolate certain workloads in certain clouds and the two never meet. The isolation requires separate admin, separate skill sets. VMware getting everyone to talk to one another is very …

… valuable for us and our customers,” said Peterson.

What about the Pivotal and Carbon Black acquisitions?

Vista Net’s Scott Brown

“I think that’s a good sign for VMware,” Peterson said. “They can show that they’re an end-to-end solution now, especially on the security side, because that’s a big pain point for my customers, especially the enterprise financial customers who need that compliance and that assurance. And, having security built into vSphere from the ground up is going to be very valuable. The [Carbon Black] acquisition  is very much in VMware’s favor.”

Scott Brown is senior systems engineer and co-owner, Vista Net Inc., based in Chico, California. The company is a regional partner, a solution provider and VMware Cloud Provider partner. Historically, Vista Net has been considerated a solutions integrator, touching everything that touches an Ethernet cable. In the last 15 years, the partner has migrated most of its customers’ workloads to VMware and virtualized workloads.

“We have our own data-center presence. I came here today, as I do every year, to see what changes in the partner program may affect what we have to do and what we need in terms of engineers,” said Brown.

The company’s customer base is all SMB, predominantly 1,000 workstations or fewer.

Brown heard about the partner program redo that’s in store.

“Every year I hear that things are going to change and it’s always going to be for the better, and I usually have conversations with my VMware reps asking what’s going to change for us,” Brown said. “We aren’t in a position, like most of the people here who might work more with enterprise customers. We’re an SMB providing services for SMBs. So, large changes in programs tend to affect us negatively. We like to make sure that we’re ready for them. In this case, it sounds like we need to start getting ready for those,” he said.

Brown attends VMworld to get information both on the tech side and business side.

Regarding news about the Pivotal and Carbon Black acquisitions, Vista Net’s market really isn’t in the development arena, but as a former developer, Brown finds the Pivotal news interesting.

“The development on the container side, the Kubernetes side, the Pivotal — all that stuff is outside the scope of what most of our customer base is going to be involved with; however, it directs me where things are moving, the integration of more services directly into the VMware kernel, EXSi, that’s always interesting for me, just to know what I might be introducing to customers. Customers have specific problems so its nice to know — yeah, there’s a road map for that, that’s something that’s coming up,” he said.

In the last 10 years, the company went from having about 20% of customers using VMware to about 90%.

“Even a single host running two or three servers is a better proposition to a lot of people than bare-metal systems running one machine — you have to buy six of them every five years. It’s just an easier solution, the ability to move those workloads anywhere they want. For us, as an SMB provider, it makes our life that much easier in a lot of ways,” said Brown.

Regarding what he needs to know about moving forward with the revamped partner program — that’s one reason for attending VMworld.

“Honestly, we don’t get a lot of information as a small partner. I need VMware to let me know what my position is and what we need to do,” he said.

Brown expects to be spending some show time at the genius bar figuring this thing out.