Kathy Gibson reports from VMworld 2014 in Barcelona – The new round of partnerships announced by VMware will help to inject new life into the company’s OEM business, particularly in Africa.
This is the word from Mark Reynolds, partner lead: southern Africa at VMware, who says the new, deeper partnerships with hardware vendors like Dell, HP, Fujitsu and Hitachi Data System will drive new sales.
The company announced this morning that HP and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) join the existing hardware vendors that will bring VMware’s new EVO:Rail appliance product to market.
They join existing partners Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur, NetOne and SuperMicro.
“EVO:Rail provides an injection for our OEM business,” Reynolds says. “It means that big vendors like Dell and HP will be putting their marketing muscle behind EVO:Rail.”
By partnering with vendors like HP, Reynolds expects the VMware footprint to grow outside of the major hubs where it is currently strong.
“From a VMware perspective, we haven’t always have the ability to touch all 30 countries in Africa where we operate. Partners like HP give us more reach to get into those markets quickly and successfully.
“We will leverage the hardware vendors channels, and also do events and channel training with them.”
In fact the EVO:Rail appliance – which will be available from the first quarter in 2015 – could be a boon for Africa.
“it’s technology that is almost plug-and-play,” says Reynolds. “From a converged infrastructure perspective, it lets us take a pre-packaged solution to market where there aren’t necessarily many skills.”
EVO:Rail takes the VCE technology and adds convergence in an appliance format. “VCE tends to address the high end of the market, while EVO:Rail fits into the bottom end. And it’s module, so users can expand as they require, or put the solution in place to quickly meet the needs of a particular application.”
The appliance solution will also appeal to mid-market companies that previously would have opted for a public cloud solution, but would prefer to keep their data centre on-premise.
EVO:Rail, together with the EVO: Rack that will be launched soon, require fewer skills to set-up, deploy and manage; and, because it runs from one power source, is eco-friendly as well.
The future for Africa is looking good, Reynolds adds. “We have always had this discussion about Africa leapfrogging the rest of the world in terms of technology, and we are seeing it happen even further up the stack now. In South Africa, users are still investing in the compute side of the infrastructure, but in Africa we ae seeing companies going to management and automation as a first buy – so they are actually moving closer to the true software-defined data centre (SDDC) concept.”
Driving this move to new technology is the fact that African users are proving to be very open-minded, Reynolds says. In addition, the availability of bandwidth has opened up people’s expectations of what technology can deliver. And there is little or no legacy infrastructure that needs to be accommodated.
“There is a hunger in the African economies,” he says.
From a channel perspective, VMware has invested significantly in skills development in the region, and has doubled the number of enterprise partners. “These partners are more skilled and can take advantage of the partner programme for deal registration and sales rebates,” Reynolds says. “I find that in most countries we have skilled partners who we can champion. And distribution is strongly under-pinning our commitment, contributing significantly to partner enablement.”
Joe Baguley, chief technology officer: EMEA at VMware, agrees with the assessment of skills in Africa. “South Africa sometimes surprises people by being as far ahead – or further – than their European counterparts. I’ve had some exciting conversations with customers in South Africa about how they are using our technology.”
Duncan Epping, from the CTO’s office, says that most of the questions he fields about software-defined networking and software-defined storage come from South African customers and partner. “We are getting a lot of questions around these technologies from people who are looking to deploy it. In many ways, South Africa is a lot more advanced than I anticipated, and often ahead when it comes to new technology.”
Ironically, while VMware is seeing healthy growth in its African business, it doesn’t yet see a great take-up in cloud computing. “Considering the channel effort, we don’t see as much cloud business as I would like to,” says Reynolds.
South Africa bucks this trend, however, mirroring the developed world in terms of cloud deployment. Current global figures indicate that 92% of cloud deployments are private and 8% public; by 2020, it is expected that 27% of workloads will be in the public cloud.
“In Africa, we are not seeing a cloud-first adoption, though,” Reynolds says. “And the consumption of VMs tends to be in the private data centre rather than the cloud.”
The benefit of VMware technology is that the same solution is used on-premise, in the private cloud or in the public or hybrid cloud. “So whether you are building your SDDC on-premise on in the cloud, you will be using the same technology,” says Reynolds. “The support, security and networking is all the same, so companies are already preparing their businesses for the cloud even while building on-premise solutions.”
