Whether you’re test driving a new car, sampling a fine wine or simply checking out the newest tablet, there’s something comforting in trying out a product before you buy it. You can feel the quality of the leather, smell the subtle peppery notes of a full-bodied cabernet or become fascinated with the speed of the new OS. Retailers aren’t just offering these “tastes” to be nice; they are wisely tapping into the psyche of today’s savvy consumers.

This same sampling approach is gaining momentum in the hybrid cloud space as we’re seeing on-demand offerings popping up in the marketplace. This smart strategy in consuming the cloud allows consumers and solution providers alike to start small and then grow on their own terms–to access cloud services instantly, pay for only what they consume, and quickly scale up or down. We’re also seeing subscription purchasing programs (SPPs) hit the mainstream. For partners, SPP is the perfect low-commitment vehicle to seed accounts with on-demand while preserving the billing relationship with customers.

Becoming Part of the Journey to the Hybrid Cloud

As a solution provider, you must continuously build upon your customer relationships. You need to stay on top of technological trends, understand workload demands and become informed about your customer’s motive in moving to the cloud. Maybe your customer is an SMB looking to find efficiencies in its workloads, a large corporation focused on evolving its business model in the cloud, or perhaps a mix of both.  But, how do you start the hybrid cloud conversation?

Here are five questions that can help you break the ice:

1. Have you considered the benefits of using hybrid cloud for your development/testing?  Moving these workloads can save you time and money. Plus, once an application is ready for production, your IT staff can either deploy it in the hybrid cloud or seamlessly move it into prod on-site.

2. Did you know that you can free up existing on-site resources by moving packaged applications like Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint to the hybrid cloud? This approach opens the door for more strategic IT initiatives, such as virtualized desktops with desktop-as-a-service.

3. Did you know that instead of building a secondary data center to support your disaster recovery plans, you could simply leverage hybrid cloud? It can also be used to extend your data center for backup, host seasonal workloads and access additional geographic locations.

4. Have you thought about moving traditional applications to hybrid cloud as a way to improve customer access? By transitioning traditional application stacks, like Java, to hybrid cloud, you open up opportunities for IT staff to evaluate the cost, management and operational efficiencies of using hybrid cloud.

5. Does your current storage solution support next-generation applications? Hybrid cloud is built to support advanced development frameworks such as Spring and Ruby on Rails, and only hybrid cloud can provide the elasticity to scale to handle the sudden traffic spikes and fast-growing demands of these applications.

Regardless of where you or your customers are on the journey to the hybrid cloud, VMware offers flexible choices that can cater to your needs. Our OnDemand offering and SPP model allow you to grow into your cloud offering at your own pace. The rest is up to you.

Want to get started with hybrid cloud? Log onto Partner Central for tools, training guides and documents. 

Djay Ramasubban is senior director of Pricing Programs at VMware. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of The VAR Guy's annual platinum sponsorship.