News Releases6 min read

VMware Enables Cloud Providers to Deliver the Software-Defined Data Center From any Cloud

VMware-powered hybrid clouds enable cloud providers to offer consistent infrastructure and operations

New innovations modernize data centers, expand service portfolios, and open new opportunities in application and developer services

VMware Cloud Verified partner roster grows 4x year over year

PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 23, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), today announced new innovations across the VMware Cloud Provider Platform that will help cloud providers further expand their business opportunities in the new application economy. These innovations, which are being showcased at VMworld 2019, will enable cloud providers to deliver industrialized hybrid clouds to customers from any location including customer data centers, cloud provider data centers, VMware Cloud on AWS as a managed service, and hyperscale public clouds. VMware’s expanded portfolio will also enable cloud providers to deliver new cloud services for differentiation and, in turn, potential revenue growth, and create clouds that are developer ready and support modern applications.

“VMware’s Cloud Provider strategy is to empower our partners with the flexibility to deliver the industrialized hybrid cloud, built on a VMware software-defined data center, from whatever location the customer chooses,” said Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president of products, Cloud Provider Software Business Unit, VMware. “Today, more than 10 million VMs run on VMware Cloud Provider clouds. Through our SDDC everywhere cloud provider strategy, VMware and its Cloud Provider Partners help organizations operate more efficiently and create more value, by enabling meaningful savings in costs and time spent on day-to-day technology operations.”

Today there are more than 4,300 VMware Cloud Providers in more than 120 countries operating out of more than 10,000 datacenters. VMware Cloud Providers are trusted advisors for customers that need expertise and guidance navigating their cloud journey. These cloud providers span from hyper-scalers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud, to strategic regional providers with specific geographic, vertical industry, or service expertise. The number of VMware Cloud Verified partners – a set of strategic partners offering a complete VMware SDDC as a service as well as value-added services–has quadrupled over the last year to more than 60 worldwide. The Cloud Verified designation gives enterprises confidence their cloud provider offers the most complete and advanced VMware technologies, with consistent infrastructure and operations across clouds.

Delivering the Industrialized Hybrid Cloud

The VMware Cloud Provider Platform enables partners to deliver a modern, industrialized hybrid cloud that combines automation, efficiency and security capabilities at scale, with lower total cost of ownership and simple, one-click deployment of infrastructure and services. At the heart of the VMware Cloud Provider Platform is VMware vCloud Director, an open and extensible cloud service-delivery platform. The latest release, vCloud Director 10, will include the following innovations:

  • Unified View of Hosted Private and Multi-Tenant Clouds: Cloud providers will be able to expand their cloud offerings to include both multi-tenant and private cloud with the natively integrated Centralized Point of Management (CPOM) capability in vCloud Director. The new capability will reduce provider challenges and costs associated with building custom tooling to manage multiple types of cloud endpoints. Cloud providers benefit from a unified view of datacenter health and status of VMs across a global cloud estate of all cloud endpoints.
  • Intelligent Workload Placement for Greater Efficiency: Intelligent workload placement, which is powered by new vCloud Director compute profiles, will enable cloud providers to drive higher efficiency from their cloud infrastructure. Cloud Providers will be able to offer self-service consumption of tiered compute, enforcement of host-based licensing restrictions, and simplified selling based on workload sizes.
  • Advanced Automation: This release of vCloud Director will feature all-round improvements in automation capabilities, including an enhanced Terraform Provider that supports complete compute and network definition as code. VMware Cloud Providers will be able to target developers who want to use open source tooling in their cloud automation.
  • Multi-Cloud Networking: Extensive networking updates for VMware NSX-T are built into this release to prepare for greater support of multi-clouds and container environments, delivered through vCloud Director’s self-service consumption.

Capture Modern Workloads with a Cloud that is Developer Ready

With VMware Enterprise PKS, a container orchestration solution, VMware Cloud Providers can offer containers as a service, moving them beyond IaaS into application services. Further, the acquisition of Bitnami provides VMware the ability to bring new solutions to VMware Cloud Providers to help them deliver modern application services. At VMworld, a technology preview of vCloud Director integration with Bitnami Community—home to one of the largest catalogs of click to deploy applications and development stacks – will be demonstrated. A combination of Bitnami Community and Enterprise PKS will allow VMware Cloud Providers to expand their multi-cloud services and address the needs of Developers and DevOps and attract new workloads, such as Test/Dev environments, onto their clouds.

Creating Differentiated Cloud Services

VMware continues to expand the VMware Cloud Provider Platform to deliver monetizable services that help cloud providers address more of their customer needs. VMware Cloud Provider partners can build and offer more services focused on bringing value, revenue and improved margins to their cloud provider business. VMware is enabling cloud providers with additional areas of growth through the following programs and offerings:

  • New VMware Cloud Provider Ready for DraaS program: The program has eight cloud providers now live and in production offering Disaster Recovery as a Service (DraaS) on their VMware-powered clouds using the latest release of VMware vCloud Availability. End users can easily view DraaS partners online at cloud.vmware.com, quickly connect directly with those partners, and easily establish a protection solution to their choice of cloud provider.
  • Object Storage Extension for vCloud Director: Delivers a natively integrated storage solution to help cloud providers grow their businesses by delivering core services customers want in the public cloud. VMware vCloud Director users can consume and operate S3-compliant object storage service that is fully integrated into vCloud Director, enabling them to store and share unstructured data within an organization.
  • New Backup Certification for vCloud Director: New certification is now available as part of the VMware Ready program so popular backup vendors can be fully certified to operate in a multi-tenant, more secure environment based on vCloud Director. Five partners have completed the certification: Cohesity, CommVault, Dell EMC, Rubrik and Veeam.

Partner Commentary

CenturyLink is a technology leader with a range of hybrid networking, cloud connectivity, and edge compute services available to customers in numerous regions. David Shacochis, vice president of Hybrid IT product management, CenturyLink, said, “Partnering with VMware as a VMware Cloud Verified partner enables us to accelerate our hybrid cloud innovation with new features powered by VMware’s proven software-defined data center technology. Most recently, we’ve added hybrid-cloud support for VMware HCX to our CenturyLink Private Cloud service, and this year we plan to add managed services for VMware Enterprise PKS to our portfolio. These new solutions, combined with our deep expertise that includes over a decade of working closely with VMware, will enable us to offer next-level cloud migration and applications services anywhere our extensive global fiber network can reach.”

Faction is a leading managed services provider for VMware Cloud on AWS. Sean Charnock, CEO of Faction, said, “A recent research(1) report that we published shows that VMware Cloud on AWS usage could explode over the next two years. Scalability, support for strategic initiatives, and cost savings will be the biggest drivers for VMware Cloud on AWS interest and adoption. This is consistent with what we’ve seen from our VMware Cloud on AWS customers, who are using our portfolio of value added services, including Hybrid Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service and cloud-attached storage.”

A Cloud Verified partner with data centers in the North America, U.K., Netherlands, Singapore and Australia, iland is a global cloud service provider of secure and compliant hosting for infrastructure (IaaS), disaster recovery (DRaaS), and backup as a service (BaaS). Justin Giardina, CTO for iland, said, “The addition of Bitnami Community to the VMware portfolio is something for which we see tremendous potential. We will be able to drive more value to our current global customer base, helping them to build apps faster and drive new levels of efficiency for their developers. We also see a massive opportunity for creating new service catalogs that will attract new customers looking to build and deliver modern cloud native applications from our secure, highly available environment.”

Internet Thailand Public Company Limited is a cloud service provider offering Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure services for businesses and individuals who want to use ICT as a tool to strengthen the competitiveness of business. Morragot Kulatumyotin, Managing Director, Internet Thailand, said “As a Cloud Verified partner, Internet Thailand and VMware have a close collaboration in both technical and sales aspects. This allows us to help customers progress smoothly towards the hybrid cloud. A key aspect of our cloud service is VMware HCX, which enables us to migrate large numbers of applications in a very short period of time with minimal business disruption for our customers. Being able to offer a complete VMware SDDC and workload portability across clouds for our customers, is very strategic.”

1- Faction 2019 VMware Cloud on AWS Market Survey

About VMware

VMware software powers the world’s complex digital infrastructure. The company’s cloud, networking and security, and digital workspace offerings provide a dynamic and efficient digital foundation to customers globally, aided by an extensive ecosystem of partners. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to being a force for good, from its breakthrough innovations to its global impact. For more information, please visit https://www.vmware.com/company.html.

VMware, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Provider, VMworld, vCloud, vCloud Director, NSX, NSX-T, Bitnami, vCloud Availability, and VMware HCX are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites.

Media Contacts

Roger T. Fortier
VMware Global Communications
+1 408-348-1569
rfortier@vmware.com