VMware CEO Paul Maritz: Cloud Checkmate

World Wide Technology helps service providers architect their public clouds and works with customers to build private clouds. WWT is formalising partnerships with cloud service providers, and channel conflict hasn’t been an issue, says Scott Miller, director of business development for virtualisation and cloud.

“In today’s market, we’re seeing cloud service providers pretty focused on making money on infrastructure-as-a-service exclusively,” says Miller.

“They haven’t shown interest in evolving into managing IT- as-a- service because that takes a different level of expertise than what they’ve invested in, and hence, comes with more risk.” WWT is developing marketing collateral that spells out how to team with VMware service provider partners during the sales cycle. “Cloud service providers don’t have that go-to-market capability. Most of the ones that went to market initially thought they were going to go direct, but they’re realising a lot of the demand comes from the channel and they need an offering that makes sense,” says Miller.

Mike Strohl, president of Entisys, a virtualisation solution provider, agrees. “A lot of the cloud offerings from service providers lack clear direction about how to overlay the technology that will make them function at a level that meets customer requirements,” Strohl says. “The reseller opportunity is to provide the consulting and integration services between on- premise systems and those that sit in the cloud, wherever it may be.”

Chicago data centre solution provider Ahead is building relationships with multiple cloud service providers. Eric Kaplan, vice president of engineering, is helping clients understand the requirements for hosting applications in the cloud, the cloud pricing models

and how service level agreements are structured. Armed with this knowledge, Ahead is starting to help clients host applications in service providers’ data centres, paving the way to a hybrid cloud deployment model.

The next step: Cloud Foundry

VMware is gaining momentum in leading its traditional channel into the cloud, but there’s  another barrier: legacy enterprise applications. Maritz has pointed to older application code as the most formidable obstacle standing in the way of customers’ cloud migration. Cloud Foundry, the open-source platform-as-a-service VMware unveiled in April, is a bid to become the PaaS of choice for developers to rewrite older apps so they’ll run well on private clouds.

VMware is piloting a commercial multi-tenant public cloud PaaS service that’s slated for launch in the first half of 2012 and is leading an open-source Cloud Foundry project under the Apache 2 licence. Cloud Foundry reflects its belief that the popularity of programming frameworks like Spring, Ruby and Node.js will continue to grow.

“Our view is that there’s a new generation of developers who will be building a new generation of applications, and we’re trying to accommodate them on our platform and also have the business opportunity,” Maritz says.