As the pace at which companies are moving to the public cloud continues to accelerate, service providers are evolving their cloud services strategy. Many are choosing to focus on delivering high-margin value-added services such as desktop and application management, patching, or help desk services in lieu of investing significant time and money deploying and maintaining their own infrastructure. VMware is supporting this shift in provider strategy. With VMware’s Managed Service Provider (MSP) offering, provided through the vCloud Air Network Program, service providers can build upon VMware’s Horizon Air cloud-hosted infrastructure to tailor their own cloud services and deliver unique solutions to their customers, all on a convenient pay-as-you-grow model.
If that’s not enticing enough, we are also announcing a Horizon Air desktop initiative, providing additional benefits to traditional service providers specifically looking to provide cloud-hosted VDI solutions to customers across the globe. This initiative is designed to give service providers a leg up when entering the increasingly crowded desktop-as-a-service market.
VMware Managed Services Provider Offering
In 2015, the MSP model was added as an expansion of the current vCloud Air Network Program. Under this, Service Providers can leverage VMware cloud-hosted infrastructure and concentrate on delivering managed services in the process.
A key requirement of participating in the MSP offering is that the Service Provider owns the terms of service and all support for their end customers. Geographic expansion is a key use case for the MSP program, where partners can quickly expand to new regions without expensive data center investments. Likewise, the ability to enhance service portfolios with offerings such as Disaster Recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) can mean delivering on important customer needs quickly. As we continue to add services to the VMware portfolio, MSP partners will be well positioned to capitalize on these technologies to enhance their own customer offerings.
Horizon Air Desktop Initiative for MSPs
For partners committed to providing best-in-class managed services for cloud-hosted virtual desktops and applications, we are announcing the Horizon Air desktop initiative for MSPs. Leveraging the reliability and performance of VMware’s Horizon Air cloud-hosted desktops and apps, participants in this exclusive initiative will receive additional benefits from current MSP offering participants such as:
- Recognition on vmware.com
- Case Studies and other marketing collateral
- Visibility with VMware sales
- Early access to upcoming features through sandbox environment
The Horizon Air desktop initiative comes with additional requirements. In addition to a 12-month commitment to the MSP program, interested parties will need to:
- Complete competency courses for all relevant products
- Agree to an annual customer satisfaction audit
- Provide a named business and technical contact for Horizon Air
In order to ensure that our desktop initiative partners are providing quality services to customers, MSPs will also be required to provide the following core services in order to be considered:
- On-boarding services
- Desktop & application template optimization services
- Desktop patching & updating
- Tier 1-2 help desk services
We are incredibly excited for the launch of this new initiative and believe this is an excellent opportunity for partners looking to provide world class cloud services to their customers.
Take the first step today by visiting the vCloud Air Managed Services Provider page .
