Petra Heinrich Liedtke, VP, Partner & Commercial Sales EMEA at VMware
It’s long been forecast that cloud would cast a spell over enterprise IT, and that prediction has certainly held. It’s a market that is set to exceed $1,550 billion by the end of the decade, as organizations all over the world turn to multi-cloud to turbo-charge how their growing slate of apps is built and run.
A huge amount of that revenue is already flowing through you, our partners; you’re empowering customers to accelerate their enterprise cloud transformations and scale their cloud-native platform operations through informed consultancy across a variety of public, private and edge cloud deployments and projects.
The allure of cloud is strong, and rightly so. But there will always be workloads that don’t suit the cloud. Data sovereignty, security or privacy considerations, or a preference for the improved performance, latency, and cost predictability that on-prem infrastructure can offer, often prompts businesses to eschew the potential advantages that cloud can provide.
We want to bring these benefits to workloads wherever they’re hosted. And that’s why we’ve created VMware vSphere+.
Introducing VMware vSphere+
VMware vSphere+™ is the multi-cloud enterprise workload platform that brings the benefits of cloud to on-premises workloads. It combines industry-leading virtualization technology, an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment, and high-value cloud services to create SaaS-enabled infrastructure, which is available on a subscription basis.
Announced in June, VMware vSphere+ promises to help IT admins and developers easily build, run, manage, protect, and secure their traditional and next-gen applications, regardless of location.
Here are four technical challenges your customers face and how VMware vSphere+ can help:
Disparate business-critical workloads
Operations teams are seeking more efficient ways to maintain and protect infrastructure, as they’re tasked with supporting increasingly larger and more complex IT environments. In many instances, these solutions are distributed across siloed locations, edge sites, and clouds leading to operational complexity and inefficient maintenance experience.
VMware vSphere+ helps you offer customers simplicity. By providing a unified infrastructure management experience for these distributed environments, IT admins can perform operational tasks directly from the VMware Cloud Console, making it much easier and more efficient for them to manage configurations and policies across their deployments, and generate value from their workloads.
Mismatched platforms
Operating on a variety of platforms can complicate management as well as application design and development, adding inefficiencies and slowing down app development workflows.
The introduction of VMware vSphere+ means you can offer customers a streamlined user experience. It provides maximum efficiency by accelerating innovation with developer services that transform existing virtual infrastructure into an enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform. This consolidates platform management with integrated logging, registry, monitoring, ingress, and more, and opens up the possibility to engage in conversations with your customers about the potential virtues of containerisation.
A talent shortage in cloud-native methods
Apps are the present and future of enterprise IT, allowing businesses to innovate and differentiate. However, application development and time-to-market are slow for a variety of reasons – a major one being the shortage of skills and talent in cloud native methods such as Kubernetes.
VMware vSphere+ helps you broaden your services skill sets to provide managed services on VMware SaaS offerings and on top of hyperscale partners VMware-based clouds. By offering seamless integration between on-prem and cloud footprints – and as a result, consistency of services – your customers can see rapid innovation. vSphere+ removes the burden of retraining, reskilling or adding additional headcount by providing a platform that enables a consistent mechanism to simplify multi-cloud and fleet Kubernetes management. Which is a big plus, given the skills challenges many businesses are encountering.
Modern cyberattack tactics
Organisations today require integrated and expanded cloud services to consistently bolster their security posture, quickly recover from disasters and site outages, and better protect against ransomware.
With vSphere+, you can offer customers a secure, frictionless experience as they will be able to continue to use their existing investments, including toolsets and domain expertise while benefiting from the expanded capabilities of VMware Cloud. They will also benefit from protection workflows available as add-on cloud services directly integrated into their operating environment including VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, an on-demand ransomware and disaster recovery service.
Choose flexible economics
Businesses are increasingly rethinking the role of digital technology in their overall business strategy, and above all, how they consume it.
VMware Partners can meet their customers’ need for unparalleled freedom, agility and flexibility by taking a new approach to cloud services through vSphere+. It allows you to pivot your business model towards subscription, while continuing to deliver exceptional consultancy and innovation to your customers, and simultaneously growing your own business through services-led opportunities.
This ability to cater to customers’ preference for the flexibility of OPEX purchases over capitalising and owning perpetual licenses is important, as sales cycle are no longer linear. Customers want flexibility and control in their consumption of technology, and VMware vSphere+ promises to make it easier for businesses to tap into technologies or services as they – and their on-prem workloads – need them. For partners, that promises increased annual recurring revenues and contract values, while also ensuring customers’ investments translate into increased agility across all aspects of their IT stack.
The technology landscape is changing fast. And by incorporating speed and flexibility into all your products and services, you can help customers become cloud-smart today.
