Top 5 Takeaways from VMworld 2015 U.S.

Here are the top five take-aways from VMworld 2015 U.S.

1. Disaster Recovery: A Great First Use Case For Cloud

Customers know they need it, and you know customers need it; now don’t be caught without it. Look for a vendor that offers you the easiest option to build and bundle managed services to monetize your DRaaS offering. VMware provides the opportunity to validate and badge your DRaaS offering, alternatively, if you are just getting into the cloud business, leverage vCloud Air and add your managed services on top as a vCloud Air Managed Services Provider

2. Cloud Brokering: Enable IT and Enable Yourself

Corporate IT is evolving to become the internal cloud broker to the enterprise. Service providers need to grease the skids for IT internally as well as mirror that externally with multi-cloud solutions. Look for a vendor that enables you to work with IT to offer and broker opex solutions for on-premise, off-premise and hybrid use cases. Take advantage of the vCloud Air Network approach to flexible licensing to enable yourself as the trusted adviser for opex cloud brokering.

3. Security & Compliance: More Critical Than Ever

Security and compliance have always been an important consideration for cloud workloads. Factor in enterprise workloads becoming the next cloud candidates, along with logical network extensions for hybrid solutions, and the case for a comprehensive approach to security and compliance is now critical. vCloud Air Network service providers can leverage the latest NSX technology to build secure logical network extensions and support their hybrid cloud story. Additionally vCloud Air continues to add compliance certificates that can be leveraged to layer in managed services for specific vertical markets and use cases.  

4. Choice and Flexibility: You Need Both To Build Hybrid Clouds

Hybrid cloud solutions can and will vary by customer use case, including parameters such as tenancy, premise, data sovereignty, security, compliance, cost and opex. Cloud vendors need to provide choice and need to flex to allow service providers to leverage various aspects of their product portfolio and program in order to accommodate each use case. The vCloud Air Network Program helps service providers address their specific customers’ needs through building or buying a cloud and leveraging products or pre-built services all in one single program.

5. Cloud Automation: Scalability Drives Margin

Service providers who want to improve margin need to deliver more services in a reliable and scalable manner. To do so requires a robust multi-tenant cloud management platform that excels in orchestration, provisioning and automation. vCloud Air Network Service Providers can achieve all of this with the recently released vCloud Director v8.0.  

Geoff Thompson is Senior Director of Service Provider Programs. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.