VMware Helps Service Providers Orchestrate the Cloud

When it comes to building a cloud computing practice around VMware it’s pretty much a make or break moment in time for solution providers in the channel.

Customers are increasingly signaling that they want to be able to invoke cloud computing services as an extension of their own enterprise. To do that in the context of a hybrid cloud computing model, they are generally going to favor cloud service providers that are using the same virtualization technologies they already use inside their own organization. Given VMware’s current dominance of the virtual server market, solution providers that support VMware in the cloud have a significant opportunity.

None of this is lost on VMware. The company this week launched vCloud Integration Manager, which allows cloud service providers to automate the delivery of service that are based on vCloud Director. According to Matthew Lodge, senior director of cloud services for VMware, there are over 6,000 partners already in the VMware cloud service program, with 90 of them already launched.

What customers are looking for, says Lodge, is the ability to access a virtualization management framework that can span both public and private cloud computing platforms, especially as application workloads dynamically move across those environments. In addition, Lodge says that IT organizations have come to appreciate the I/O capabilities of VMware virtual servers and the way the company is able to manage the allocation of system resources across multiple virtual machines. In contrast, Lodge says these are capabilities that are not readily available on “commodity cloud platforms.”

No matter how partial a solution provider might be to one virtual machine or another, the chances are high they are going to wind up supporting multiple instances of virtual machines from different vendors. In fact, the issue at hand shouldn’t be which ones to support, but rather how quickly they can be deployed underneath cloud computing services that are finally starting to gain some traction with customers.