vCloud Integration Manager Targets VMware Service Provider Base

VMware has made cloud service providers a mainstay of its cloud commitment since day one, and the introduction of VMware vCloud Integration Manager represents a further solidification of that target group by making it easier and less expensive for them to automate the delivery of private clouds based on VMware vCloud Director.

The company also said it has now nearly tripled to nearly 90 its base of global service provider partners that comply with the criteria that qualifies them as "VMware vCloud Powered." That program requires VMware Service Provider Program partners to offer services based on vSphere and vCloud Director while "exposing the vCloud API and supporting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF)."

Accelerating time to revenue and simplifying operations to increase efficiency and reduce costs are the cornerstones of vCIM. Accelerating time to revenue comes from tightly integrating the new product with a range of VMware's heavy cloud hitters, including vSphere, vShield Edge and vCenter Chargeback Manager, toward the goal of automating and expediting the provisioning and delivery of infrastructure and associated services.

Simplifying operations to increase efficiency and reduce costs is based on vCIM's inclusion of Web-based portals to streamline and automate service plan, customer lifecycle and reseller management. According to VMware, "With the click of a button, service providers will be able to standardize product configuration and delivery, manage customer lifecycles from sign-up to decommission, and reduce the time and overhead involved in transaction with resellers."

vCIM offers a product catalog that defines the available packages of cloud services on offer to customers, and features a reseller hierarchy that defines the resellers who are allowed to auto-provision their own customers. In this environment, service providers can set optional capacity limits by reseller, and allow resellers to define sub-resellers via n-tier distribution.

Service providers or resellers are able to provision customer orders by instantiating a set of products for them. This step is often driven by CRM or other front-end order systems via the vCIM API. vCIM automatically provisions everything to complete the order across vCloud Director and other VMware products such as vShield and vSphere.

Participating service providers are located in such countries as the U.S., Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Phillipines, Russia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.

VMware vCloud Integration Manager is expected to be available in Q1 of 2012 and will be priced on a usage-based subscription model that the company says is familiar to vCloud Service Providers.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/03/2012 at 12:48 PM