VMware has hired architects to help partners build services around virtualisation and cloud computing, said John Donovan, VMware’s director of channel sales for Australia and New Zealand.
“Partners tend to focus on a couple of areas only, such as sales and technical enablement. We’ve gone a step further and focused on services enablement - an area that not many other vendors focus on.”
The architects would accompany partners to customer sites to design and deliver services. Donovan claimed that VMware’s assistance to partners showed it was more committed to a channel model than its competitors.
“Some other vendors are promoting a homogeneous environment that disenfranchises the partner community.
“The roles (VMware) partners are playing in positioning the data centre puts them in a good position to be thought leaders.”
Revera joins service provider program
Revera, an infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service provider in New Zealand, said it had registered with VMware’s Service Provider Program (VSPP) program, which launched in October.
“The reason we signed up straight away is because it fits so well with our customers. Now licensing is on what is used rather than buying a licence and having it sit on the shelf until we sell it,” said Gael Hargreaves, CEO of Revera, which in the past had to make large capital investments in VMware software licences.
Hargreaves said Revera was planning to upgrade from backing up data between its data centres to full replication of its services. The provider could then “flick over” from one data centre to another in the case of an outage rather than face downtime while restoring backup files.
“VSPP allows us to do that in the most cost-effective way,” Hargreaves said.
The pay-as-you-go licensing scheme would also make it easier to move to self-provisioning for customers, Hargreaves added.
The VSPP program would eventually be the main arrangement for service providers to buy licences, said Paul Harapin, VMware’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand.
“No-one’s buying (blocks of) licences in the service provider world any more,” he said.
VMware had “more than doubled” the number of products available under the program as part of its shift to an IT-as-a-service, consumption-based business model.
Licensing had also changed from the number of virtual machines in use to the amount of virtual RAM, which the vendor claimed was more cost effective for partners “in the long term”.
The vendor said more than 200 partners in Australia and New Zealand had registered with the VSPP program.
Other program benefits included marketing tools such as the “vCloud Powered” branding, a proven cloud architecture used by large telcos globally, and specialist services delivery teams who would help partners rapidly build out their cloud services.
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