VMware pushes partners to take cloud downstream

Virtualisation giant warns VARs not to treat cloud as an enterprise-only revenue opportunity

Virtualisation giant VMware has told partners to stop viewing cloud as an enterprise-only solution, as it strives to gain more ground in the SMB market.

Speaking to the press at the vendor's European partner conference in Copenhagen yesterday, Andy Hunt, vice president of partners and inside accounts at VMware, urged partners not to overlook the SMB opportunity in cloud.

"There are lots of [SMB] customers that have not started on the journey [to the cloud] yet or need help in taking the next step," said Hunt.

"One of the big requests I have made to our solution providers is to get back into the SMB market [by] looking at those customers that have not yet virtualised and spinning them up in the same way we did four or five years ago."

Hunt's plea to partners followed the announcement of two new cloud offerings from the vendor at the event, called VMware Go Pro and VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus.

The former is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product designed to make it easy for SMBs to manage, monitor, and secure both physical and virtual machines through a single console.

The latter is an on-premise endpoint security and anti-virus management system designed for use in both physical and virtual environments.

Jürgen Kühlewein, senior director of EMEA channels and SMB at VMware, added that addressing the needs of SMBs was nothing new for the firm.

"We are already doing a big portion of our business in the SMB and have tripled the number of SMB customers over the past two years," he explained. "Virtualisation and VMware is not just for enterprise customers."