by Frederic Grange, EMEA SE Director of Cloud Provider Business
Imagine that you are a cloud service provider based in France. You have built a vibrant business working with other French companies, supporting their growth ambitions with the technology solutions they need, using local data centers.
Because your customers are ambitious, however, inevitably one of them wants to explore a new market – Germany, perhaps. The nature of their business means that they require that same support you already provide, but in the new market, or using a different type of cloud.
Traditionally, that would leave you with two choices. Either take a risk on a customer trialling a new market and invest in local infrastructure yourself; or accept that the customer would move on to a bigger provider that can meet their requirements, and more than likely take the majority, if not all, of their business with them. It can be a frustrating situation if neither option fits with your business model or strategy.
At VMware, we talk about how our partners, across all our solutions, are our sales team. We would never have grown to be the company we are today without our partners, which is why its vital that we continue to support those same businesses to develop themselves.
To that end, we have consistently invested in solutions that will not only provide enterprises with the technology they need to achieve their own goals, but that will help our partners grow as well.
For our French service provider, that could mean evolving into an asset-light partner. Like many of the providers we work with, it is delivering highly differentiated and profitable cloud services from its own VMware-based clouds. To meet the demands of growing customers, these providers are looking to expand their business model to offer VMware Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) running in the major public clouds without owning and operating the underlying cloud infrastructure. These asset-light business models have created the need for Project Path, which will enable cloud providers to unify service delivery and operations for VMware-based clouds running both in their own data centers and in public clouds.
It is, as this blog outlines, “the manifestation of VMware’s vision for its cloud provider partners—to help them expand from infrastructure services to turnkey cloud platforms that are developer-friendly.” Cloud providers will be able to deliver a suite of services—self-service multi-tenant IaaS, containers, migration, backup, disaster recovery, object storage, database as a service, security, application templates, and more—on any VMware cloud endpoint. Additionally, Project Path will help unify cloud provider operations such as customer management, customer usage, billing, and customer support across all VMware-cloud endpoints.
Then there’s the VMware Cloud Director service. A Software as a Service version of the VMware vCloud Director service-delivery platform, it allows managed service providers to easily share a pool of VMware Cloud on AWS capacity across multiple tenants. This will reduce providers’ overall costs while providing the flexibility to right-size VMware Cloud on AWS environments for mid-market enterprise customers.
In other words, assisting both partners and customers to meet their business requirements. Its an approach that has provoked overwhelmingly positive feedback from partners such as WE ANKOR, the Israeli cloud and security leader, IONOS, the European cloud provider, and UKCloud, the public sector specialist.
WE ANKOR has been a VMware partner for the last decade and has fully invested in building services based on our technology. That includes self-service Infrastructure as a Service, based on vCloud Director, and Disaster Recovery as a Service, using vCloud Availability. “The market is evolving a new set of capabilities, a new set of services that will most probably only be available in the public cloud,” explains Roy Barkai, vice president, Cloud Division, at WE ANKOR. “We want to be there for our customers to give them a one-stop shop. VMware Cloud on AWS is a huge opportunity for us, and also for our customers.”
For both UKCloud and IONOS, working with us is an opportunity to offer new services to customers that meet their specific requirements. The former’s product manager Guy Martin, underlines this when he says “working with VMware is making us more agile, and most importantly allowing our customers to innovate and drive transformation across UK public sector.”
Hans Nijholt, VP Enterprise Cloud, expands on this by detailing how IONOS is deploying new models itself. “VMware is evolving its toolset in the direction we see as critical for customer success. A part of our customer group still needs steps to do a cloud transformation. Together with VMware we’ve been able to offer a pay-as-you-go license model, which is quite unique in the market.”
IONOS, UKCloud and WE ANKOR are just three examples that our French cloud service provider could follow. That’s the beauty of it – Project Path, VMware Cloud Director and our other solutions have been introduced to allow our partners to choose what’s right for both their customers and their own business objectives. It doesn’t matter whether they choose to be asset-light or an MSP – whichever direction they go, they have the support and backing to be successful.
Hear more from IONOS, UKCloud and WE ANKOR in this video series on how we’re working together to help real customers on a daily basis:
