Virtustream upgrades itself to offer multi-cloud management

Virtustream has upgraded its cloud by adding automation and management capabilities that customers or service providers can use to manage both apps on the company’s cloud and, in the future, on external clouds too.

Virtustream is Dell’s public cloud, but doesn’t go head-to-head with the likes of AWS and Azure with a portfolio of IaaS services. The company instead focuses on lift-and-shift of mission-critical applications from on-premises installations to the cloud. The company’s schtick is managing both infrastructure and applications, rather than wiping its hands of things above the hardware layer as most IaaS players prefer.

That arrangement means that Virtustream’s own management tools have only been available to its own staff.

Until now: as explained to CRN by Deepak Patil, the company’s senior vice president for product and technology, Virtustream’s upgrade sees its tooling made available to customers as-a-service with an API

The effect of doing so is twofold. Firstly, it means Virtustream customers now have more management options for the workloads they place in the company’s cloud. Secondly, it means Virtustream’s tooling will be available to manage workloads on clouds other than its own. Which is of interest to the channel, because it means a decision to partner with Virtustream offers a chance to manage applications in multiple clouds.

“An average organisation will use three to six cloud providers for various reasons,” Patil said. “We know we will not run all of an organisation’s workloads, but we want to prove that we are a cloud platform that plays well with other clouds.”

All of which means that Virtustream’s cloud upgrade doesn’t just enhance its current offering, but also makes it a cross-cloud management contender.

The company knows it’s unlikely to win standalone business, because its focus is still very much on winning customers for its own cloud. But the upgrade means that pitch now includes the possibility of building a Virtustream-centric application portfolio spanning multiple clouds.

Patil said the company was already working on more SaaS offerings to make that proposition more powerful, and has put “hundreds” of developers to work on the effort and built a CI/CD pipeline that will see new features and offerings emerge at a steady clip.