SAN FRANCISCO – If the Software-Defined Enterprise was the main message coming out of VMware’s Partner Exchange conference then a close second was hybrid cloud.
VMware plans to offer the channel a new cloud provider solution competency along with a vCloud hybrid service solution (vCHS) competency.
Eric Gales, the VMware Canada country manager, told CDN that he believes the market will end up with some kind of hybrid cloud. “It makes total sense especially in an IaaS or SaaS and the vendors in the market, to-date, who offer public clouds, are proprietary. With vCHS it’s the same thing you run in the data centre. It has enormous potential and it’s not just another silo. All the concerns with the cloud such as security, up-time and management are handled by vCHS. It projects the management onto the public cloud and can move in between clouds. The channel is just waking up to this and the neat thing is everything we build and originates from us we make available to the partners,” Gales said.
On the cloud front, VMware grew its partner base by more than 200 per cent, according to Ramin Sayer, the senior vice president & GM of VMware’s cloud Management business unit. That growth includes more than 3,000 channel partners who have started selling cloud management solutions from VMware.
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“This growth has also increased the attach opportunity for channel partners by more than 40 per cent along with increased margin sizes and deal sizes for VMware partners,” Sayer said.
The services opportunity should also be noted for solution providers. Carl Eschenbach, president and COO of VMware, told the crowd at Partner Exchange that the services opportunity for SDE will reach $100 billion by 2016.
Sayer added that 65 per cent of the deal he saw in 2013 had increased services attached to them, which also produced more total dollars earned by the partner.
“We want for 2014 to take marketshare and expand the overall market by $8 billion and on the services side it will be roughly a $23 billion opportunity for partners in the cloud services addressable market,” Sayer said.
He added that VMware wants customers of all sizes to realize the value of virtualization and cloud solutions delivered by channel partners these new channel enhancements help solution provider differentiate themselves in the market.
One of the new enhancements will start this May where solution providers can satisfy tier requirements by attaining any solution competency. VMware hopes this initiative will reduce the upfront investment costs for partners, while diversifying and differentiating the offerings along with the skill sets. With this change, VMware partners will now need to have two sales (VSP) and two pre-sales (VTSP) accreditations for all solution competencies.
VMware also made some tweaks to solution competencies in order to enable channel partners to build cloud practices. They are:
• Infrastructure virtualization competency will become the server virtualization competency;
• The management competency will become the management operations competency, and will focus on VMware vCenter operations management suite.
• The Cloud IaaS competency will evolve to the management automation competency, and will focus on vCloud Automation Center.