VMware’s Hybrid Cloud Offering: What Does It Mean for Zumasys?
Last week at VMworld 2013, VMware’s announcement of its vCloud® Hybrid Service™ (VCHS) shook up the cloud computing landscape. With VCHS, VMware has essentially become a cloud service provider (SP). Like us.
As I met with people around the vendor expo floor (shout out to NetApp for providing Zumasys a prime spot in their booth!) and in the hands-on-labs area, everyone wanted to know my take on VCHS and what it means to cloud providers like Zumasys.
Let’s start with the basics. The partnership between Zumasys and VMware remains very strong, and both companies have made increased investments in time, money and energy into building our technology strategy and business. I choose to not take the introduction of VCHS as a slight to existing SPs. I choose to embrace and understand VMware’s decision. And I choose to believe VCHS is a good thing even if it is somewhat competitive.
Not all products in the same market are equal. Think about the auto industry. If I’m Tesla, I’m not all that worried when Hyundai rolls out its first hybrid. This is no different for cloud providers. Realistically, VCHS is no different to us than the offerings of other large providers, such as AWS, Rackspace and Terremark. While it appears to be a great product offering, it is still missing the boutiqueness of what we do for our customers.
Personalized service, smooth migrations, executive access, side-by-side colocation availability, high-touch technical support staff and support for custom apps and legacy apps—VCHS does not (and cannot) offer anything like our “white glove” cloud services. We also continue to focus on small/medium and mid-size enterprise businesses that require flexibility, whereas VMware has essentially claimed they want really large workloads (their flagship customer is sitting around 6,000 VMs). So if on the surface it appears that VCHS is a direct assault on existing SPs, I don’t believe that to be true at all.
In fact, VCHS may HELP our business. It is worth stating here that the company that at one point was basically 100% of the x86 virtualization market—a number that I’ve seen drop—is not not about to sit idle while competing hypervisors win in the public/hybrid cloud market. As an SP that’s powered by VMware products, I’m more inclined to think positively. VCHS makes it possible for more business to stay within the VMware ecosystem by making true hybrid setups with maximum portability a reality for customers. Honestly, I’d probably be a bit more unsettled if I were hedging on other vendors, as VMware has been a very consistent partner and VCHS has the ability to be fairly disruptive.
To wrap up: Nothing is changing here at Zumasys. We aren’t secretly planning an exodus to a different platform or anything of the sort. Instead, we are going to keep an eye on how VCHS plays in the market and where customers are finding great benefits. At the end of the day some of you might end up with holding some of your infrastructure with us, some back at your office, and some at VCHS We think that’s a great win for everyone.
As Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and a member of the Zumasys executive team, Andy sets the technical vision for the company and the architectural direction for the Zumasys cloud computing platform.