Market pressures to accelerate digital transformation and remain competitive have caused organizations to look for a cloud environment that will give them the freedom to innovate and also improve responsiveness to market conditions. Whether they need an environment that will give them additional resources to handle peak periods or they need a large, fully-flexible, multi-cloud, hybrid infrastructure year-round, that’s where vCAN – the VMware vCloud® Air™ Network of service providers – is so important. When we announced our Cross-Cloud architecture to power the multi-cloud approach, we always knew that the technology would be just a part in helping end user organizations achieve a fluid cloud approach. But it’s our service provider partners who are best placed to create a true hybrid solution thanks to their managed services, vertical market experiences and closeness to the customer’s business needs.
And so it was this discussion that formed the basis of our very successful vCAN LIVE event in Paris yesterday. Held at Radio France and broadcasted online, we had more than 700 attendees representing 25 countries across EMEA.
A live panel including Ajay Patel, Senior Vice President Product Development, Cloud Services, VMware and local cloud experts addressed the need for organizations of all sizes to be free to choose any public cloud yet still maintain full control and visibility.
On the panel, Graham Crich, EMEA Director for Cloud and Service Provider Partners, flagged the growing opportunity for partners, with infrastructure as a service expected to reach a 23% 5-year growth rate in 2020. And Jay Workman, Senior Director, VMware vCloud Air Network Program Marketing, noted that, with the majority of VMware’s customers still running purely on-premise environments, that means untold opportunities for vCAN partners if we enable them with the right tools to bring solutions to market.
Ajay Patel acknowledged that a lot of customers struggle with the complexity of migrating existing workloads to public clouds. They want to take advantage of the benefits of using public cloud but without the high cost of migrations and operations. This is where vCAN partners come in. VMware-based clouds provide a seamless and safe landing pad for these enterprise workloads. vCloud Director provides service providers with the ability to offer value-added networking services with fine grain control and self-service access by tenants while NSX provides the ability to securely connect and extend a customer’s data center to the cloud. Some customers are simply looking for disaster recovery solutions and VMware is helping partners commercialize that with vCloud Availability, which provides an easy on-ramp and cost-effective DR solution.
But how to integrate our technologies into their stacks? Laurie Clough, Sr. Director, vCloud Air Network Technical Services, urged partners to take a look at the content on the dedicated VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit for Service Providers (vCAT-SP) site and make use of self-service reference documents via solution enablement toolkits already available in multiple languages.
This event was driven to ensure our partners know exactly how we can work together to drive change and help customers on their digital transformation journeys and move fast in this ever-changing industry. A big message from the day for our partners was to keep letting us know what they need from VMware to help them succeed – whether that’s developing new solutions or even just different ways to provide support and training around their go to market.
If you are a vCAN partner looking for more information on VMware solutions, go here. Or, if you want to find a VMware vCloud Air Network partner that meets your business needs, go here. And don’t forget to join in on the conversation on Twitter and like the vCloud page on Facebook.
