European Service Providers are challenged to differentiate services and add value as enterprises look to hyperscale cloud providers to decrease costs and gain flexibility. However, even as hyperscale public cloud providers gain momentum, EU enterprise customers are experiencing very real needs around data geography, data center proximity, and performance/reliability – needs that can’t be easily solved by hyperscale public cloud providers.
Fortunately, VMware enables Service Providers to deliver added value – and differentiated – services that complement customers’ hyperscale public cloud strategies rather than compete with them, while also solving the unique challenges of EU enterprises.
The primary areas of interest (and concern) for EU enterprise customers include:
- Managing across multiple clouds and leveraging hybrid cloud
- Geographic dispersion and EU regulatory compliance
- Enterprise grade performance for mission critical applications
Even though hyperscale cloud providers continue to grow, their one-size-fits-all offerings can’t address many enterprise needs. The VMware Cloud Provider Platform not only helps Service Providers drive revenue and deploy highly scalable cloud environments with minimal risk, it can also increase efficiency while giving Service Providers the ability to differentiate at an infrastructure level.
The Cloud Provider Platform is comprised of a unified stack of VMware technologies that includes VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX, vCloud Director and Usage Meter. The platform creates greater efficiencies for Service Providers with multi-tenancy support and easy self-service, which reduce costs and improve time-to-revenue.
How does the VMware Cloud Provider platform position Service Providers to succeed in a highly competitive environment while addressing the unique needs of EU enterprise customers?
Let’s start with the ability to manage across multiple clouds and leverage hybrid cloud.
40% of European organisations already stretch applications across clouds, according to IDC. With a common operating environment, the VMware Cloud Provider Platform enables more seamless portability of applications, as well as interoperability between multiple clouds – all without impacting, operations, automation, visibility, security or governance.
When it comes to cloud, managing and governing across a geographically dispersed enterprise creates its own challenges. Add to that the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming in May 2018, and there is no avoiding the impact on the way cloud data is managed across geographies.
With NSX Layer 2 across the Internet, the VMware Cloud Provider Platform reduces communication costs while also providing a common operating platform across clouds. This means that all locations have access to the same services without sacrificing compliance requirements. VMware vSphere 6.5 also helps address data security with encrypted VMs managed via policy to tenants – just click and encrypt without the need to retool or reskill.
While hyperscale public cloud can deliver some of the benefits customers are after, Service Providers are still best positioned to deliver the enterprise grade performance customers demand. Also, as the VMware Cloud Partner Strategy evolves, further integrated hyperscale services such as hybrid cloud extender, as well as partnerships with hyperscale providers, will be exposed to partners in the MSP program and add to the partner value proposition. The VMware Cloud Provider Platform today provides cost effective performance and high availability capabilities that large data sets and complex environments require. This includes:
- Layer 2 VPN connectivity to minimize downtime reconfiguration for mission critical applications
- The ability to migrate VMs with zero downtime via NSX & vSphere
- Cost effective single instance High Availability with vMotion
In addition, the platform includes enterprise-grade functions and features and operations designed to lower costs. With Usage Meter, Service Providers can take advantage of granular consumption metering for NSX and vROPs, which allows providers with granular version metering of the products the VM is consuming. Larger VMs can be run less expensively on vSphere than hyperscale public cloud providers; you only pay for what is consumed and there is no charge over for VM’s using more than 24GB reserved RAM. Segregated clustering also enables the delivery of different services to different customers as needs, and new revenue opportunities, arise.
For EU Service Providers, now is the time to realize the benefits of moving to the VMware Cloud Provider Platform. You can set yourself up for success with the value-added, differentiated services that let enterprise customers manage across multiple clouds and address the challenges of geographically dispersed organizations, all while taking advantage of enterprise grade performance. This means you can not only differentiate infrastructure services from hyperscale public cloud providers, but accelerate revenue opportunities and develop new services that drive growth.
Go here to see how you can make additional revenue by up-selling component NSX-derived services.
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