In a recent video segment, VMware Chief Technology Officer Ray O’Farrell reiterated what we first heard a couple of years ago, about how the cloud computing and virtualization company wants to be the “Switzerland of cloud.”

Given that VMware was HyAlto’s first major industry partner and remains a critically important one, the idea of serving as this neutral third-party in a sea of competing interests between hyper-competitive tech giants holds great appeal for us. In fact, it is central to our identity.

The Switzerland theme prevailed at VMworld, where we attended and had a booth in the exhibit hall.

With multi-cloud becoming the norm, enterprises lack the visibility to ensure they are not paying for services or capacity they don’t use and that their cloud usage is right-sized and aligned with business priorities. Our revenue-focused cloud management platform is a single dashboard that is automated, cloud agnostic and scaleable, to provide MSPs and their enterprise clients alike with a single pane of glass or a single point of data with which to address these needs.

At present, we have partnerships with VMware and Veeam to support their services on our platform. Talks are underway with other cloud service providers. VMware was a great place for us to begin to build a market presence because its ecosystem of some 4,500 MSPs represented, and continues to, a rich pool of prospects with which to prove our value proposition.

Many of these MSPs are in the midst of a transition that is often as painful as it is necessary. They are expanding and diversifying their service offerings from the business model on which they were founded – as a service provider for VMware alone, architecting and managing an on-premise data centre, dependent on the traditional (and increasingly outdated) business model of fixed-term contracts.

OF even greater importance to us is the shared philosophy we have with VMware of how best to address the real business challenges faced in a multi-cloud world by MSPs and their enterprise clients. That is, serving as that neutral third party which doesn’t take sides.

VMware has come a long way toward becoming “Switzerland” since the idea first surfaced in 2017. It has secured partnerships with the three top public cloud service providers as they seek a “lift and shift” partner to help enterprise clients migrate more workloads to the cloud.

Despite their obvious and inevitable self-interest, the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google understand that enterprises are increasingly embracing multi-cloud strategies to find the most cost-effective way to lever the cloud for competitive advantage. It’s in their own best interest, as Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has summed it up, to “meet customers where they are, not where we happen to think they should be.”

On the other hand, there are horror stories aplenty about cloud-sprawl, unexpected overage charges, poor performance and security risks. The complexity of managing different services from different providers and ensuring they actually provide the much-touted benefits, instead of creating more headaches than they solve, is a material issue for enterprises across the board.

We aim to fix that with our revenue-focused cloud management platform, but we can’t do it alone. VMware is demonstrating real industry leadership with its emphasis on playing the role of Switzerland. We are doing our part to provide MSPs and CMPs alike with the tools they need to take advantage of that.