VMware Calls Out Service Providers
As an early Christmas card to its many and valued service provider partners, VMware did a survey that started out by assessing the pervasiveness of public cloud, moved to addressing the adaptation of IaaS (it's going well), and finally wound its way to updating the challenges facing those valued service providers.
Starting with the pervasiveness of public cloud adoption, VMware didn't really need a survey to tell them that it has moved beyond test and development in many companies. More specifically, the study says that 67 percent of the mid-market and enterprise companies surveyed have implemented what they refer to as mission-critical workloads based on IaaS, and 80 percent of IaaS customers surveyed are running production workloads.
Reflecting on its relationship with cloud service providers, and elaborating on the study-- conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group-- VMware says "Seventy percent of current IaaS customers use cloud storage services, followed by 58 percent using cloud servers, and 53 percent are leveraging disaster recovery services."
In other findings, the survey shows that 85 percent of respondents say service and support tops a list of criteria for selecting cloud service providers, while 25 percent say TCO is the single most important criteria in that selection process. Compatibility was also an issue: "Seventy-eight percent of respondents reported that it was also important that their cloud service providers' infrastructure technologies were compatible with their internal private cloud/virtualized datacenter."
Finally, 83 percent of respondents say the underlying technology used to deliver IaaS was of "some level of importance" to them, with nearly half citing it as a very important or critical factor when considering IaaS.
According to VMware, "The VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) is for service providers offering cloud computing and hosted IT services built on VMware software. There are 9,400 service providers in more than 60 countries in the VSPP today."
Service providers are obviously a key factor in VMware's ongoing journey to the cloud, and it makes good sense for the company to call them out from time to time as they have with this survey.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/14/2012 at 12:48 PM