What Can I Do with My Leftover SPP Credits?

By Matt Kwok, Business Planning Leader for Cloud Services, VMware

While many customers are familiar with the benefits of VMware’s Subscription Purchasing Program (covered in previous posts), one question I am commonly asked is, “What can I do with vCloud Air if I only have a few SPP credits leftover?”

This question usually comes up when a customer has already used most of their purchased credits to fund their main projects, and now discover that they have a few dozen unused credits that are nearing their 12-month expiration date. Alternatively, they may have purchased some trial SPP credits as part of an Enterprise Agreement and are now looking to burn them down.

The good news is that there are many interesting ways to use vCloud Air that require only a few credits, and these projects can even extend past the credits’ expiration date as long as the projects start and are prepaid while the credits are still valid.

Here are some ideas:

If you have 10 SPP credits

• Create an Online Team-Building Event: Tired of the same old team dinners and service projects? Try standing up a Minecraft or Team Fortress server in vCloud Air to run a multiplayer game tournament that everyone can join, even if they are remote
• Setup a Hands-on Lab or Temporary Classroom: Train your IT workers on a new tool by setting up a 3-month hands-on lab or virtual classroom environment in vCloud Air that they can access no matter where they are.
• Run a “Vendor Bakeoff”:  If you are comparing multiple vendors for a given tech solution (say monitoring solutions), why not create a temporary environment in vCloud Air that mimics your on-prem data center and allow them to plug-in and compete head-to-head? Try them all before you buy.

If you have 20-50 SPP credits

Run those upgrades that you have been delaying: One customer, a large retailer, saw their unused SPP credits as an opportunity to finally upgrade their e-commerce application to the latest versions of Windows Server and Microsoft SQL server.

They purchased a small Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), deployed new server images from the vCloud Air service catalog, and replicated their on-prem application data to vCloud Air for development and testing. With a Public IP address in their VPC, they could open up their app in the cloud for public testing without affecting their on-prem production environment, and eventually migrated the upgraded application back on-prem with no need to convert.

As a result, this retailer fully upgraded 25 servers in one month with no service interruption – at less than a quarter of the cost of doing it on-prem.

If you have 100 SPP credits

Geographically scale your web apps for performance: Many organizations live or die based on the performance of their public website, and this is especially true for e-commerce sites (e.g. , marketing media, product search, service quoting) – every second of latency directly translates into customer drop-off and lost revenue.

These organizations can more effectively serve customers across regions by taking advantage of vCloud Air’s global footprint to decrease latency. Are most of the users in North America? Create two sub-regions by standing up servers in vCloud Air’s Northern California and Virginia locations, and place a F5 Global Load Balancer from the Solutions Exchange in Texas to redirect user traffic to the nearer coast. Are customers spread across the world? Expand that setup to include Germany and Australia as well to maximize performance on an international scale.

Ready to use your SPP credits? Apply them to any vCloud Air service through MyVMware or pay-as-you-go with vCloud Air OnDemand.

View the full list of cloud services at vCloud.VMware.com.

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Matt leads vCloud Air’s business planning practice, driving go-to-market and pricing & packaging strategy across all cloud services. He is passionate about using the power of the cloud to transform the way we work and live, and his experiences include stints at Microsoft, Accenture, and various startups in the United States and in Asia.