New VSPP Management Bundle Provides Revenue Opportunities for vCloud Service Providers

Here at VMworld in Barcelona, the theme for the opening day is all about management. We’re focusing on how customers can deploy more automation capabilities to advance further down the path towards the software-defined datacenter, a vision that was articulated at VMworld San Francisco a few weeks ago.

A critical component of delivering a software-defined datacenter is the VMware vCloud Suite, a comprehensive product stack that provides customers with all the key ingredients for building a cloud with improved management and automation capabilities. So what’s the opportunity for vCloud Service Provider partners delivering public and hybrid cloud services? The answer is in the new management packages available in VSPP that help partners deliver exceptional value added cloud services.

Key takeaways for service providers:

1. There is a new vCloud bundle in VSPP that includes management and automation capabilities, which builds on the two existing service provider bundles.
2. There are also new stand-alone management products being added to VSPP – vFabric App Director for Provisioning and vCenter Protect Standard.
3. The new management bundle and the stand alone products are expected to be available in VSPP in Q4, 2012.

VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) overview
As background, the VSPP is for partners offering cloud computing and hosted IT services built on VMware cloud infrastructure. Through a scalable pay-as-you-go license rental model, VSPP allows partners flexibility in service delivery with no up-front expenses. With over 9,000 partners in the program to date, the program continues to see rapid expansion due to strong market demand. VMware recently announced the continued momentum of customers deploying public and hybrid clouds based on VMware cloud solutions. In fact, VMware and VSPP partners combine to form the number two public cloud ecosystem in the world.

New Management Bundle for vCloud Service Providers
VMware partners delivering vCloud Services have enjoyed the benefits of a robust cloud stack, from the rock solid performance and availability of the vSphere platform to the ability to efficiently provision and manage customers’ virtual datacenters in vCloud Director. Now, with the addition of vCenter Operations Suite 5.6, cloud providers can better manage their own infrastructure service levels and capture new revenue streams through add-on services delivered to customers.

vCenter Operations delivers the following benefits for service providers and their customers:

• Improved SLAs with service health reporting along with predictable alerts in advance of performance degradation in the infrastructure.
• Increased service margins through improved capacity utilization, forecasting, VM right-sizing, capacity reclamation and automated views and alerts to speed decision making.
• Ability to deliver compliance as a service through automated patching and provisioning, utilization of comprehensive change tracking to isolate root cause, and remediating images to normal with single-click rollback.

VSPP Management Packaging
VMware is adding a new vCloud management bundle and several stand-alone products to VSPP. These products will be available in Q4, 2012.

The new management bundle is called “vCloud Service Provider Bundle – Premier Plus Edition” and is comprised of VMware vCenter Operations Suite Enterprise 5.6, that includes vCenter Configuration Manager and vCenter Chargeback, vCenter Server, vCloud Network and Security Advanced (formerly vShield) , vSphere Enterprise Plus and Production Support. The bundle is priced at 10 points per GB reserved vRAM/month and represents a 30% discount off of the a la carte components. My previous post provides more details on the VSPP subscription pricing model and the reserved vRAM metric.

In addition to the new bundle, there are new stand-alone products in VSPP:

• vFabric App Director for Provisioning – enables more efficient application deployment and management through console that manages all the tiers in the application layer (e.g. app server, middleware, database) and an intuitive drag and drop UI. Price: 4 points per GB reserved vRAM.
• vCenter Protect Standard – an easy to use patch management solution optimized for Windows VM images. Price: 3 points per server virtual machine.

What vCloud Service Providers Are Saying
vCloud Service Providers tell us they plan to leverage these new capabilities to improve both the management of their own infrastructure services, as well as delivering new value to their customers that they can monetize:

“As a rapidly expanding cloud service provider, iLand is excited about the bundling of vCenter Operations Suite Enterprise with the core infrastructure stack in VSPP. The VMware management tools enable us to deliver new value added services to our customers such as additional monitoring that allows them to streamline their audit and compliance processes. We can also improve our own internal infrastructure operations to reduce the amount of time our staff spends on conducting root cause analysis, capacity planning and managing audits. The new VSPP bundle makes it easier for us to deliver and use these new capabilities.” – Dante Orsini, SVP Business Development at iLand

“We’re very excited about the addition of the new bundle to VSPP. We are in the process of looking at vCenter Operations and have started to use it internally. The addition of the solution to the bundle is going to help us tremendously to drive scale internally and also deliver additional benefits to our customers.” – Archie Seale, Director Cloud Product Management at MindSHIFT Technologies
[See Archie discussing the management bundle on YouTube here.]

How can I learn more?
More details around the new management offerings for service providers will be shared in a vmLIVE VSPP Solution Focus webcast after general availability. For those partners attending VMworld this week in Barcelona, I’d also encourage you to join me for session #PAR1519 “How to Sell and Deliver Services Powered by VMware vCloud.” The session is on Wed at 11:00 and accessible to registered VMware Partners in the PartnerTrack.

For future updates on VSPP and the VMware Service Provider community, follow @VMwareSP on Twitter.

For more information on VSPP, or how to become part of VMware’s service provider community, please visit the VMware Service Provider page.