TECHNOLOGY
VMware helps partners to capture the multi-cloud opportunity
VMware has revealed the next evolution of the company’s flagship VMware Partner Connect program is live worldwide.
Partner Connect is a singular, unified program for all partner types that is now more flexible and efficient, provides faster and simpler paths to progression, delivers more incentives, and rewards partners for both performance and capabilities.
Through Partner Connect, VMware is empowering partners to drive growth by helping their customers successfully navigate the multi-cloud era.
As organisations move from an environment of ‘cloud chaos’ to a cloud smart approach, there is a significant and immediate opportunity for partners to help their customers accelerate migration of applications to the right cloud, automate and secure the software supply chain, and rein in control of spend on private and public cloud infrastructure. VMware, together with its partners, will tackle each of these problems by supporting critical business outcomes such as accelerating app modernisation, enabling enterprise cloud transformation, and securing the hybrid workforce.
Tracy-Ann Palmer, VP, global channel sales programs and Compliance, VMware, said: “Through Partner Connect, we are reinventing the VMware partner experience.
“Our strategy is for every VMware partner to own the customer lifecycle end-to-end, leading with services, partnering with others, and building predictable, recurring revenue streams.”
“IDC is seeing a transition in the market today, where for customers it’s not just about digital transformation, it’s about digital first. This continued evolution will drive changes in how the VMware partners engage their customers, where and how they create value, and how they interact with an increasingly connected ecosystem,” said Steve White, VP Channels & Alliances at ID. “The transformation we see VMware delivering in the Partner Connect program is a recognition of these macro trends. By bringing everything together under one VMware program with a more simplified experience, VMware can help partners transition to as-a-service/subscription models, expand their services portfolios, and better leverage their investments to the fullest.”
Helping Partners Drive Revenue and Growth from the Multi-Cloud Opportunity
Optimised for partner profitability, Partner Connect now better supports today’s cloud-, services-, and solutions-centric business models, aligns partner enablement, practice development, and incentives to critical business outcomes, and opens more opportunities to create value across the complete customer life cycle – pre, during, and post sales. Updates to VMware Partner Connect that are now live for partners include:
Unified, Flexible Points-based Program: One program platform for all partner business models, connecting partner programs and value-added activities in one universal point system. New structure recognises, aggregates, and rewards partner accomplishments across transactions, service delivery, capabilities, and specialisations, and supports partners however they choose to go to market, whether via one business model or several.
Rewarding Partner Investments and Capabilities: Track-specific criteria rewards partners with incentives and benefits as they grow their VMware practices and progress in Partner Connect. Partners can earn points for achievements in both training and innovation, from foundational capabilities to differentiated services and IP.
New Automated Insights: The completely overhauled partner dashboard provides a robust, self-service experience enabling partners to customise views so they know exactly where they stand across program metrics at any time. Partners can easily track history, performance, and progress toward capabilities, specialisations, and next level availability.
Expanded Practice Development: VMware Ignite is a proven partner practice activation and development program that VMware funds on behalf of partners. Ignite is now available to all partners across all routes to market. Ignite has helped thousands of partners build capabilities and accelerate growth with a uniquely structured end-to-end practice development framework that is rigorous and time-bound yet flexible and robust.
Partner Business Models Aligned to Customer Outcomes
Customer success depends on a connected ecosystem. No one company can solve all a customer’s needs alone. Through four distinct business models, VMware has created an interconnected and diverse Partner Connect program enabling more partner-to-partner collaboration to help customers become cloud smart and achieve outcomes faster. Partners can participate in one or more business models, with each model opening a door to more incentives and even faster program progression. Supported business models now include:
- Solution Reseller –resells VMware software and services to customers.
- Solution Services Provider –offers services before and beyond the transaction, with an emphasis on pre-sales advisory and post-sales lifecycle services.
- Cloud Services Provider –offers VMware-based cloud and managed services on a geographic basis, including hybrid and multi-cloud services.
- Solution Builder –embeds VMware technology as an integrated component of their own software offerings.
Lifecycle Incentives Reward Partners Across the Entire Customer Journey
VMware is delivering more incentives aligned with VMware Cross-Cloud services. Transitioning to SaaS and subscription services helps VMware partners move beyond transactional sales towards high-margin, repeatable sales. With the new partner incentives historical tracker, VMware partners can review their total payout in previous quarters to better understand where they can maximise their profitability and identify potentially missed opportunities. New and enhanced incentives now available to qualified partners include:
- Sell Incentive: backend rebate program aligned to partners’ program level that rewards eligible partners for selling SaaS, Subscriptions and Licensed Software. VMware now pays 2-10x more for SaaS and Subscription sales versus licensed bookings.
- Activate Incentive: rewards partners for providing professional services to customers to transition to a public cloud and activating and consuming VMware Cross-Cloud services.
- Deployment Incentive: designed to reward partners for accelerating their customers digital transformation with select VMware solutions for application modernisation and multi-cloud.
New Influence Performance Points for Non-Transacting Partners
Previously, partners could only progress through the program with tier credits earned through transacted bookings. Now, non-transacting partners registered as Solution Services Providers have a path to level up in the Partner Connect program by earning performance points for influenced bookings. Solution Services Providers offer their customers services before and beyond the transaction, with an emphasis on pre-sales advisory and post-sales life cycle services.
Expansive Training, Competencies, and Specialisations Unlock Larger Opportunities
VMware offers partners 14 Solutions Competencies, 8 Master Services Competencies, and two Specialisations partners use to close larger, higher margin deals faster. Partners can now earn capability points toward program progression based on their investment in training, competencies, and certifications.
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TECHNOLOGY
Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3
AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.
Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:
Next-generation chips
This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.
The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.
As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.
Zero-ETL integrations
AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.
A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.
The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.
Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.
Amazon Q
A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.
Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.
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TECHNOLOGY
HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces
Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).
Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.
The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.
Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.
“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”
Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.
“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”
Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.
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TECHNOLOGY
Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud
Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.
It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.
MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.
Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says
In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.
With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.
Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.
“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“
MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.
Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.
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