IBM, Oracle, Dell, VMware Put Hybrid Cloud Center Stage
We highlight platforms and initiatives each company has so far unveiled in February.
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Much of the success of hybrid cloud hinges on its foundation. And for Eric Herzog, chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels at IBM, storage constitutes that foundation.
In that vein, Big Blue this month unveiled new storage products for hybrid clouds. Look for associated partner incentives, too. (We’ll outline all that in the following slides.)
IBM is emphasizing that no one in the technology world – not even the most behemoth, longtime vendor – can ignore the cloud. That inevitably translates to the channel as well. Herzog says partners who want to avoid the cloud just can’t anymore.
“Cloud’s not stealing your business,” Herzog says. “The world changes, so you adapt.”
On the storage side, IBM has taken that to mean that it must make its products cloud-friendly and more accessible.
“People want more for their money and that means things that used to be high-end features need to be brought down market,” Herzog says.
IBM has done that with updates to its entry-level flash storage systems. The work reflects what Herzog reiterates to channel partners: “You don’t fight the wave, you ride it. … Ride the hybrid cloud wave.”
The new FlashSystem 5200 measures about the size of a pizza box but contains enterprise-grade performance. Maybe best of all, it’s not sky-high expensive, starting at $25,000.
“It’s like the price of a Corolla but has the features of a $125,000 Lexus,” Herzog says.
Those features include 1.7 pedabytes of capacity, six-nines of availability, hybrid cloud and container integration and 70-millisecond latency.
“Our competitors’ best latency is 100 milliseconds,” Herzog says. “But that 30% faster is on their highest end, most expensive product.”
Capabilities include access to separate storage for total availability; “logical air gap,” for security; and support for software containers à la Red Hat OpenShift. Plus, Herzog says, partners can get the system up and running in minutes.
“There’s no need for a setup guide.”
All this, Herzog says, “gives partners more market space to sell.”
Partners like incentives. Big Blue does not disappoint with motivation to sell the new 5200 system.
Through June 30, managed service providers, VARs, ISVs, system integrators and other IBM channel partners can earn two times the rewards on sales of the 5200. That can total $500, $1,000 or $1,500 per system, depending on the configuration. And IBM says it will pay up to $1,500 per public reference a partner secures. (That applies to FlashSystem Storage Suite for Cloud Paks) Finally, the first 52 qualifying sales will win prizes valued at an additional $3,000.
IBM announced new opportunities around its Cloud Satellite.
The vendor announced its Cloud Satellite in 2020 but finally launched the satellite into general orbit. As a result, the hybrid-cloud-as-a-service platform has gone from beta to general status. More than 65 partners are working to build applications and features for the offering.
Check out the story Kelly Teal wrote about IBM.
If you have customers in oil and gas, the military or other government, agriculture, field science or another vertical fraught with tough conditions, you know data collection makes up a significant part of the work. A major challenge lies in gathering that information with little or no connectivity, and keeping it safe. Oracle has devised a rentable (or permanent, if the customer chooses) solution that addresses these needs. Enter the Oracle Roving Edge Device (RED).
The box holds cloud workloads that have to happen outside the organization’s data center. To that end, it’s ruggedized and portable (despite weighing in at 84 pounds). It provides cloud computing and storage, machine learning inference, and even runs custom applications and accommodates virtual machines including databases and containers. It features low-latency processing. All in all, says Ross Brown, vice president of product marketing at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, “it’s a pretty beefy device.”
Oracle has priced RED at $160 per device, per day of possession per node (a single cluster can house five to 15 nodes). It’s designed for customers to keep as long as they want. Well, OK there is a limit: RED lives for three years. Until then, however, users may keep the device for as short a time as a day or up to the full three years, all at the per-day cost. Or, they can destroy it, if they want to take zero security chances, and pay the lost fee.
Oracle sees a lot of channel partner possibility stemming from RED. They can “use this as a platform to enable new apps and new managed services for customers at scale,” Brown says. The thing is, the uses for the device look wide open, so it’s hard to specify how the channel will react.
“I don’t know exactly what partners are going to do with it,” Brown says.
Challenge accepted?
By the way, if you didn’t know, Oracle is becoming more partner friendly as it builds its cloud focus. The company hasn’t exactly been known for its channel centricity, as Brown notes (Brown, as you may recall, served as channel chief at VMware). That’s changing.
“They are really thinking this through,” Brown says, referring to the way Oracle works with the channel.
“We don’t have a path forward without partners building on us.”
To that end, Oracle doesn’t operate on a partner resale model anymore. Instead, Oracle pays partners who are enrolled and certified in its program. Those partners register solutions they are developing for customers and earn a percentage of that spend as a rebate. End users, meanwhile, buy unified, consumable credits. That way, they know what they are paying and they buy the services they need from partners. And the arrangement seems better for partners, too, because they aren’t consumed by the transaction or its price.
“It’s much, much simpler,” Brown says.
And if cloud itself represents a simpler, more efficient way to do business, it stands to reason that associated channel programs should follow suit.
Dell Technologies Cloud this month debuted its new private cloud platform. It’s part of the company’s hybrid cloud service.
The Texas-based vendor bills the capability as a “reimagining” of its existing solution, for more flexibility and improved cloud economics.
It “introduces a simpler and scalable way for customers to build their cloud of choice without the additional layer of deploying the VCF software stack,” Shivani Agarwal, a cloud product marketing consultant for Dell Cloud, wrote in a Feb. 9 blog. “This new solution will serve as an essential building block to enable customers to build their own on-prem private cloud.”
The platform goes for $14 per instance, per month. A monthly subscription that includes all hardware, software and service components for hybrid cloud starts at $47 per instance, per month.
Dell Cloud touts a “time to value” of 14 days with the new private cloud solution. Users may bring their own racks. Channel partners (or their customers) order instances in the self-service console, in various quantities. Instances can be mixed and match to support a variety of workloads, too.
Dell Technologies’ Scott Millard says the channel will uniquely benefit from the new private cloud platform. Millard is senior vice president of global channel, alliances and OEM specialty sales for the company.
“Partners have a tremendous opportunity to help customers focus more on delivering business outcomes, less on managing IT with technology operated by them, but managed for them,” he tells Channel Futures. “IT will also increase its ability to respond quickly to changing business dynamics when they scale up or down, across any environment, on demand.”
The private cloud solution will be available this quarter as a referral option for distributors and solution providers in the United States, the U.K., Germany and France.
“These partners can earn a significantly increased referral incentive,” Millard says.
For Millard, the launch of the private cloud platform points to Dell Technologies Cloud continuing to do what works best for the channel.
“It’s clear that our strategy is working, and we are staying the course to support partners as we always have,” he says.
Accenture and VMware are ramping up their work together with a multiyear, multimillion-dollar joint investment. They’re calling the effort the Accenture VMware Business Group. The companies aim to help organizations go cloud-first and get to the cloud faster. A spokesperson tells Channel Futures the initiative will drive consumption for VMware cloud services at the hyperscaler providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform).
Accenture, one of VMware’s biggest channel partners, brings about 2,000 of its cloud professionals to the venture. Those people are trained in VMware products and services. Their areas of expertise encompass hybrid cloud and cloud migrations, cloud-native and application modernization, and security across key industries.
The new group is part of Accenture Cloud First. Accenture launched that initiative in 2020 with a $3 billion investment.
“Cloud is the single most powerful tool for mastering change,” says Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture. “As organizations accelerate their move to the cloud and edge over the next few years, the Accenture VMware Business Group will help deliver the speed, scale and security they need to fundamentally reinvent their businesses and create more value.”
The Accenture VMware Business Group will invest in joint go-to-market and sales operations. It also will train more Accenture practitioners in VMware technologies and develop new services, assets and accelerators, all underpinned by VMware technologies. The two companies will further create pre-engineered vertical industry solutions.
“To meet the demands of today’s unprecedented business environment, organizations must employ a multicloud strategy — more rapidly than ever before,” said Pat Gelsinger, former VMware CEO, before he left to take the top job at Intel earlier this month. “Increasingly, customers are running their applications on one or more clouds, data centers and the edge, and the Accenture VMware Business Group will bring together the world-class teams and expertise required.”
Accenture and VMware are launching a Cloud Migration Factory, too. That will serve as a lab environment for clients to plan, test and migrate their applications.
The new business group “reinforces VMware’s pivot to a SaaS delivery model with subscription licensing, illustrating a new level of partnership that is required as it transitions to a modern, multicloud SaaS company,” the VMware spokesperson told Channel Futures.
The Accenture VMware Business Group will invest in joint go-to-market and sales operations. It also will train more Accenture practitioners in VMware technologies and develop new services, assets and accelerators, all underpinned by VMware technologies. The two companies will further create pre-engineered vertical industry solutions.
“To meet the demands of today’s unprecedented business environment, organizations must employ a multicloud strategy — more rapidly than ever before,” said Pat Gelsinger, former VMware CEO, before he left to take the top job at Intel earlier this month. “Increasingly, customers are running their applications on one or more clouds, data centers and the edge, and the Accenture VMware Business Group will bring together the world-class teams and expertise required.”
Accenture and VMware are launching a Cloud Migration Factory, too. That will serve as a lab environment for clients to plan, test and migrate their applications.
The new business group “reinforces VMware’s pivot to a SaaS delivery model with subscription licensing, illustrating a new level of partnership that is required as it transitions to a modern, multicloud SaaS company,” the VMware spokesperson told Channel Futures.
Cloud deployments are king. Last year, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed organizations into the cloud faster and sooner than expected. Hybrid cloud has proven itself among the most flexible and workable of configurations.
Now, in the first quarter of 2021, four of the largest hybrid cloud vendors are amplifying their efforts. The slideshow above highlights recent big cloud news from IBM, Oracle, Dell Technologies Cloud and VMware that channel partners need to know.
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