It signed a hybrid management deal with Accenture in late 2014 and has been helping Rackspace manage Microsoft applications and services running on Rackspace or hybrid within Microsoft public cloud data centres.
Rackspace has yet to formally extend this program to Office 365 or custom apps on Azure but that seems only a matter of time at this point according to Staten.
“Bigger players in the market are less willing to concede defeat to AWS and Azure,” he claims. “Such is the case with VMware and Google.
“Both have aspirations of competing head to head with Amazon and Microsoft but need help in getting there faster.
“VMware’s vCloud Air is mostly a standard IaaS offering with limited application services and thus limited developer appeal.
“To get there faster it’s signed on to resell selected Google Cloud Platform services to its cloud customers and to do the integration work so they appear “native.” VMware will also sign HIPAA BAAs for deployments that span the two services.”
Meanwhile, Staten believes that while Google has the ear of many a modern app developer it has nearly no reach into enterprise I&O departments - “this partnership lets them ride in on the backs of the VMware sales channel.”
“This approach would be solid strategy if their two public cloud offerings were fully complimentary but they certainly are not,” he adds.
“An enterprise vCloud customer can’t use Google’s compute instances from their vCloud account, nor the many GCP and Google App Engine services Google offers and VMware doesn’t resell. You'll have to get a separate GCP account for that.”
The trend in public cloud platforms is towards providing more application services that make modern apps easier to build and developers more productive.
Staten believes Google has a distinct advantage here and will likely turn many VMware resales into native accounts.
“This puts even more pressure on VMware's (and the greater EMC's) R&D teams to accelerate application services for vCloud Air - or hand over their clients,” he predicts.
What does this change in thinking in the cloud service provider space mean for enterprises? “All goodness, really.”
“You already have relationships with traditional managed service providers and enterprise vendors who are waking up to cloud,” Staten adds.
“Now you can use those same relationships to ensure developer productivity and hybrid deployments that meet your corporate IT standards.
“You’re not going all cloud anytime soon, and the learning curve for your I&O teams to manage the hyperscale cloud environments is steep.”
The right managed service provider fills this gap, claims Staten, and will take on the liabilities and custom SLAs you continue to want but can’t get from the hyperscalers.
“Win, win for you and the hyperscalers,” he adds.