VMware Unlocks Multicloud Opportunity for Its Cloud Providers

Most VMware cloud providers (CPs) deliver cloud services powered by a VMware-based cloud; however, industry analysts say the future of IT is multicloud.

That’s why on Friday the virtualization giant announced a portfolio of cloud services, or enhancements, to the VMware Cloud Provider Platform, to help its cloud providers monetize the multicloud opportunity.

The new extensions to the VMware Cloud Provider Platform include giving partners the ability to modernize their own VMware Cloud-based cloud; giving partners the flexibility to expand their offering with an “asset light” model, for example, VMware on AWS; and enabling partners to build multicloud managed services with VMware’s cloud services.

“Partners can access these new services – such as monitoring, costing, security, compliance, for example – services that they can access from VMware, wrap it up in their managed services and work with the end customer to manage the workloads across heterogeneous clouds,” Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president of product management, cloud provider software business unit at VMware, told us.

An “asset light” model use case is a partner managing workloads in a VMware-based cloud in one location that wants to do business in another location without investing in data-center capacity. In this case, the partner utilizes VMware software running on AWS as a service and layers managed services on top of it. The partner eliminates the capex and moves forward to deliver services on this asset-light model.

As trusted advisers to their business customers, VMware CPs must expand their service offers beyond the VMware cloud to include the three types of clouds: the VMware Cloud, the hyperscale cloud (with VMware running on AWS), and native hyperscale, or public, clouds – AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure – with different workloads that have their own diverse requirements.

“The fundamental thing driving multicloud is that end customers are looking at digital transformation, which is a priority for them,” Bhardwaj said. “With digital transformation, multicloud becomes the foundation … that’s because there’s no single cloud that meets their diverse requirements, and end customers are looking for best-in-cloud technology and services from different cloud providers.”

Diving in a bit deeper on the three extension areas, VMware is introducing the following:

VMware Cloud on AWS enables partners to …

… complement their own existing managed SDDC offerings or create a net-new VMware managed SDDC offering using an asset-light model to provide customers with a hybrid-cloud service ideal for cloud migration, data center extension, disaster recovery, regional expansion, or application modernization use cases.

VMware Cloud Services help partners manage, secure and operate both VMware-based clouds and native public clouds such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Today, VMware is offering VMware Log Intelligence for monitoring and incident response management service for VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere, vCloud Director and AWS deployments.

VMware cloud providers total 4,000 worldwide. These VMware partners deliver VMware cloud services – around infrastructure and operations – to more than 100 countries. Managed services provided by VMware Cloud Providers are broad and may include patching of the OS, backup, disaster recovery, migration and security, for example.