VMware has announced the public beta release of Stage Manager, its first solution designed for those who work in pre-production infrastructure environments, with the vendor promising channel partners will see an increase in market and revenue opportunities with the new offering.
VMware Stage Manager is an automation and management system that allows IT teams to visualize and work through service transition activities, such as testing and staging, as new applications are delivered into production.
Melinda Wilken, senior director of marketing at VMware, says Stage Manager helps businesses minimize risks and potential downtime.
“Stage Manager reduces capital costs because of better resource utilization,” Wilken said. “It also gives IT teams the ability to make changes and updates more quickly in order to support business needs.”
Although the Stage Manager public beta is now available, global availability won’t be coming until summer. Wilken says an advantage if the product is that it’s a horizontal solution that holds value for any application that’s working up to the production stage.
“We’ll be working in the coming months on our go to market strategy,” Wilken said. “Stage Manager will be available to our entire network of resellers though.”
Julie Eades, director of worldwide partner marketing at VMware, says she hopes all VMware partners will participate in the beta, adding Web-based training has already been established. In addition, in-person training will also be available for partners.
When it comes to partner recruitment, Eades says VMware is continuing its search and this year wants to place a special focus on Canada, which she says continues to be an important part of VMware’s market.
“Stage Manager will be a great opportunity for the VAR to talk to their current customers to help them bring down costs and to help make them more competitive in their business,” Eades said. “My message to channel partners is that they take a look at this product and embrace our training.”
Eades also says partners will be able to cross sell and add on to their customer’s current virtualization needs by introducing Stage Manager into the business infrastructure.
From an operational standpoint, Wilken says Stage Manager is a point and click service solution with aWeb-based user interface and a the back end hosted on VMware infrastructure.
“Stage Manager allows IT to build up a pre-production image of the system so they can clone it and pull it back to be used in whichever stage they want it in,” Wilken says. “These clones are exact replicas so this helps mitigate risk during service transition activities before they go into production.”
Both Wilken and Eades are certain that with the coming global availability launch of Stage Manager in the next few months, partners who deploy this solution will have a way to differentiate themselves in the market place.
“Stage Manager will no doubt add tremendous value to partner sales kits,” Eades said. “This solution will allow partners to not only target new customers, but it will also allow them to go to the customers they’ve already sold virtualization to as well.”