VMworld 2020 is here … virtually of course! As most of you know, this is always an exciting week for us with plenty of announcements and updates. And we’re not going to let 2020 change that!
We have the biggest set of updates and announcements in years for our cloud providers and partners. We are introducing VMware Cloud Partner Navigator, the culmination of a multi-year strategy to simplify the delivery of both flexible IaaS offerings and a robust set of cloud services. In addition, new innovations for VMware Cloud Director are planned to enhance networking and extend virtual machine (VM) expertise to containers and Kubernetes (K8s) services.
Helping Partners Deliver Any Cloud, Any Service
Our long–term goal is to deliver solutions that help our VMware partners take advantage of the multi-cloud op
portunity. Whether by building a differentiated cloud or offering services across a variety of clouds, our partners should be able to connect their customers to any cloud and any service.
The initial focus for Cloud Partner Navigator delivers key investments to help our core cloud providers and Managed Service Providers (MSPs). We also recognize growing interest from the larger VMware partner ecosystem to evolve their business models to better benefit from the multi-cloud and cloud services opportunities. We look forward to working more with those partners in the future so stay tuned in to our updates and provide us feedback on how you could benefit from this new offering.
Discover New Partner Platform for Multi-Cloud Services
Customers are turning to partners to help simplify the complexity of the multi-cloud world. Cloud partners are well positioned to help, but to be really effective they need to overcome some key challenges: limited access to easily expand to new clouds and services, higher costs and complexity of multi-cloud operations, and fragmented end customer experiences.
We are thrilled to announce VMware Cloud Partner Navigator, previously unveiled as Project Path, designed to help partners easily expand their business opportunities beyond their own clouds and services. Partners will be able to build their position as a trusted adviser to customers by offering flexibility and choice to run their applications in the cloud that best meets their operational and business requirements. VMware Cloud Partner Navigator is a SaaS platform that evolves from VMware Cloud Provider Hub and tight VMware Cloud Director integration to provide a unified portal for consistently managing customer relationships, service subscriptions, usage, billing, and support across a multi-cloud landscape.
The new, unified platform is designed to help partners enable their customers to:
- Simplify operations by consolidating services with a local, trusted provider
- Accelerate time-to-value with easy, self-service deployment of resources and apps
- Rapidly solve IT challenges without data center investments
- Utilize existing VMware investments and expertise
Embrace Next-Gen Networking & Security in VMware Cloud Director 10.2
Next, the innovations for VMware Cloud Director continue. We’re excited to announce VMware Cloud Director 10.2, which will introduce key features focused on networking, security, applications and containers—along with a common base across VMware Cloud Director and VMware Cloud Director service.
The new version will help partners expand their network and security services with VMware Cloud Director and VMware NSX-T Data Center. A number of key VMware NSX-T capabilities will be integrated, including support for distributed firewalling to increase network security offerings and better hybrid cloud connections through layer 2 VPN (regardless of on-premises versions of NSX). And in case you missed it, VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Network Load Balancer) is now available to all partners in NSX Base edition as a replacement for NSX-T native Load Balancer.
With the 10.2 release, it’s time to get serious about upgrading to NSX-T to take advantage of all the latest innovations in networking. For help with NSX-v to NSX-T migration, also check out the dedicated NSX Migration Tool for VMware Cloud Director, with new version 1.1. now available.
Be “Future Ready” with Modern Apps and DevOps
The third area of news is centered squarely on the increasing demand for Developer-Ready Clouds and application services.
Now, VMware Cloud Director 10.2, along with the VMware Tanzu strategy, will make it easier than ever for partners to expand from providing just VM infrastructure to also offering containers as a service—all on a unified and integrated platform. VMware Cloud Director 10.2 will make Kubernetes a first-class entity with integrated support for VMware vSphere with VMware Tanzu and the new Container Service Extension 3.0. The simplified path to containers-as-a-service will enable partners to aggressively target developers and devops engineers to help with the application modernization trends.
We’re also excited to announce Application Launchpad 2.0, a key extension to VMware Cloud Director that was released earlier in the year. If you missed that update, App Launchpad provides an easy application deployment experience for tenants, on top of VMware Cloud Director, by delivering a catalog of applications from Bitnami, provider single-VM applications and more. The new 2.0 release continues to help providers be “future ready” by extending support to deploy applications with 1-click as VMs or containers.
These key updates enable partners to take a huge step forward in expanding their service portfolios with offerings focused on Kubernetes–as–a–service and applications–as-a–service.
Multi-Cloud Journey Just Beginning
From multi-cloud service delivery to network and security solutions to modern applications, VMware cloud partners are empowered more than ever to differentiate their business and expand their customer appeal. From the VMware perspective, we continue to execute on our vision: helping partners go deep to build an efficient cloud, go wide by expanding beyond their cloud, and deliver tools to unify it all and simplify busines expansion.
Learn more about our key product announcements from VMworld 2020 at the blogs below. We look forward to hearing about how you are continuing to help more and more customers see success in their cloud projects and multi-cloud journey.
