VMware today on the eve of the annual VMworld conference announced several extensions to a VMware Cloud Provider Platform (VCPP) program that is now based on version 10 of the VMware vCloud Director platform.
VMware vCloud Director is a management framework VMware makes available to partners delivering managed cloud services to VMware customer. VMware today announced that VMware vCloud Director now supports S3-compliant object storage services, which has become a de facto standard application programming interface (API) for delivering cloud storage services.
That capability follows other recent enhancements to the platform that provide higher levels of automation, unified views across multi-tenant instances of private cloud deployments, and enhanced integration with NSX-T network virtualization overlay that can now connect to multiple clouds made up of virtual machines and containers. VMware has also made available a Container Service Extension that makes it possible for its partners to extend the reach of VMware vCloud Director to any distribution of Kubernetes clusters running containerized applications.
VMware is also integrating Bitnami Community, a catalog of applications and development stacks, based on a platform VMware acquired earlier this year, into the Cloud Provider Platform via both vCloud Director and VMware Cloud Provider Hub.
The latest updates to the VCPP program itself announced today include a Backup Certification for vCloud Director certification that five partners have initially achieved and a VMware Cloud Provider Ready for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) program that eight cloud service providers are initially participating in.
In total, VMware says there are now more than 4,300 VMware partners participating in VCCP. VMware is trying to strike a balance between services provided by partners and a set of managed services it recently launched for Amazon Web Service (AWS) and on-premises platforms based on infrastructure from sister company Dell EMC. VMware sells those managed services direct to customers as well as through managed service provider (MSP) partners.
A subset of VMware partners are using the managed services provided by VMware to either deliver a complementary set of managed application services or relying on VMware to extends the reach of their infrastructure services into other geographic regions, says Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president of products for the Cloud Provider Software Business Unit at VMware. That approach eliminates the need for those partners to make additional capital investments, notes Bhardwaj.
“When it comes to the public cloud there is no one size fits all,” says Bhardwaj.
Overall, VMware reports it has seen a 44% growth in the VCCP program year over year, with partners now managing more than 10 million virtual machines running in more than 10,000 data centers, says Bhardwaj. That capability makes it possible for VMware customers to now run any application on any cloud platform they want, says Bhardwaj.
It’s not clear to what degree VMware will be able to supplant rival virtual machine platforms running on various public clouds. However, as VMware extends its cloud partnerships beyond AWS and IBM, the opportunity for VMware channel partners to add value will only increase in the months and years ahead.
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