Hopefully if you're an ISV partner of VMware (and part of our TAP program) then you've heard of validation services. Basically, they are a set of well defined engineering services that you can take advantage of, typically with little or no cost to you. Overall we try and give you guys the hands-on experience with VMware products you need to be both confident and knowledgable about how your applications will work when deployed with VMware products. Over the last year we've been working hard to broaden the set of services we provide, ideally so validation services is no longer just a starting place for ISVs, but is instead a set of milestones that can help you get very mature in terms of adoption of virtualization technology. This blog entry will provide a quick overview of these services – if you're interest you can follow up with your account manager or myself to discuss taking advantage of the offerings.
Performance Validations
These validations are our traditional "bread and butter", and we've done nearly 100 of these efforts in the last few years. The assumed goal here is to prove that an application works well on vSphere, and hence that there is room in the market for us both to make more money by positioning them as a mutual offering. Often the partner perceives issues with performance initially, or just hasn't had the resources to test it themselves. Within a couple weeks of lab time we can typically all learn alot, and show that the products work well together. We eventually write up some market facing deliverables (aka a deployment guide) so we can keep the field knowledgable and customers moving forward in combining these technologies. For now, I'll include our BCDR efforts in this catagory, where we look at things like VMware HA, and Site Recovery Manager (our DR solution) work with a specific application, and if there is any extra value we can add by understanding such failover solutions for a given app in detail.
View Validations
Clearly we're spending alot of work in getting our desktop focused products to the leadership role that our server side products are at. Hence we get many questions on what client-side apps work well with view, and which if any don't work at all. Similar to our performance (server) validations, we typically provide lab and engineering resources to test how view supports such apps, often undertanding how any attached USB devices work, and addressing questions like how WAN latency or bandwidth constraints might impact view usage. Again, we always write up some field facing doc to summarize our learnings when completed.
Cloud Enablement (SAAS) for ISV Partners
We are extremely interested in helping ISV partners adopt cloud technology, and typically that revolves around using a Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) model to deploy applications for our mutual customers. We have two exciting new product sets in this space. Our vCloud Director product, which helps with automation and provisioning of applications, as well as providing multi-tenant deployments with a natively single-tenant application. vShield products are a set of tools for providing "virtualization-aware" security to cloud based applications. Overall our goal in this effort is helping a partner understand the technical requirements of a SAAS deployment, and how VMware (and potentially 3rd party) products can help them get there. Typically this is more of a process, rather than a descrete event, when compared to our other services, as the timelines of such a deployment can be long, and we're interested in helping all the way along to production go-live and beyond.
We are very excited about the learnings we're getting out of working with ISV partners on these broadened list of services, and we hope you'll take a moment to think about which of these services might help you differentiate your products further from your competitors. Look forward to working with you guys!
