VMware Channel Leader: New VMware Cloud On AWS Pricing Opens Up Market For Partners
The whopping 50 percent price cut on VMware Cloud on AWS opens up the door for VMware channel partners to pursue new business opportunities, according to Frank Rauch, vice president for VMware's Americas Partner Organization.
In an interview with CRN at VMworld 2018, Rauch said VMware Cloud on AWS is "ubiquitous" in terms of the types of customers buying into the offering.
"We have financial logos. We have healthcare. We have state and local. We have education. We have all different types of logos. So now, lower that price a little bit, you start to get a lower entry and you expand the number of buyers. You can expand the total addressable market for the channel," said Rauch. "What's really great about this is that the channel loves and is really good [at selling] down in that market – extending our reach."
Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware announced the price cut along with a smaller three-host minimum software-defined data center (SDDC) configuration as a starting point for production workloads. Amazon also is arming VMware partners with its database-agnostic Relational Database Service (RDS) that enables easy setup, operate and scale databases in VMware-based environments that are on-premises or on the Amazon Web Services public cloud.
Additionally, for a limited time, the virtualization leader will offer a three-host SDDC environment for the cost of a two-host configuration.
"It just really opens up the market for partners," said Rauch.
Rauch also touched on VMware's planned acquisition of CloudHealth Technologies. The Boston-based company offers a cloud operations platform across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud which enables customers to help analyze and manage cloud cost, usage, security and performance centrally for native public cloud.
"[The channel] is asking to be on the front end of the cycle. They're asking to add more customer value. They're asking to be consulting rather than reacting to RFPs. I believe tools like CloudHealth will them to do that," said Rauch.