It’s almost three years since VMware and Amazon Web Services launched VMware Cloud on AWS. This hybrid cloud offering enables customers to extend their on-premises vSphere environments to the AWS public cloud.

That’s plenty of time to gauge the market response for this service and see if it’s proving to be the good basket for HyAlto’s eggs that we expected it would be.

Last November, we attained VMware Partner Ready for VMware Cloud on AWS validation. It marked the next chapter for HyAlto as we continue to expand the capabilities of our platform to support a variety of on-premise and cloud services. This is to help our Managed Service Provider (MSPs) and Cloud Service Provider (CSPs) clients efficiently deliver and manage a true hybrid experience with the options and flexibility demanded by their enterprise customers.

We are now one of 150 such partners in the VMware Cloud on AWS partner ecosystem. VMware recently published this blog post about the importance of this ecosystem to its own business outlook.

The purpose of VMware Cloud on AWS is to provide organizations with an easy way to transition from their traditional on-premise data centre (with VMware) to a public cloud (AWS). As with any other cloud migration strategy, the interest in doing so is being driven by the potential for cost savings and the flexibility to easily scale up with additional storage or computing capacity without having to invest in more on-premise IT resources. This interest in the advantages of a hybrid cloud is growing across industries and among organizations of all sizes.

As Sandy Carter, VP, AWS Windows & Enterprise Workloads, wrote back in 2018, it’s all about “adding value to your business without added hardware costs; it’s about feeling confident that your business can scale up or down capacity without friction; it’s about getting to the cloud quickly so that you can take advantage of all the cloud offers; it’s about maximizing your existing VMware investments.”

This sales pitch has found traction. Last October, AWS reported that it had four times the number of VMware Cloud on AWS customers than it did a year ago, and those customers have deployed nine times the number of virtual machines.

At SearchServerVirtualization, writer Brian Kirsch noted how “this growth eases implementation and cost concerns for organizations that have yet to adopt VMware’s cloud platform. As organizations get more comfortable with VMware Cloud on AWS, it opens a gateway to other AWS-native features.”

That’s important, because perceptions around the cost of deploying VMware Cloud on AWS does remain a concern for many. A survey published last September by Faction, one of the premier VMware Cloud On AWS MSPs, found that 46 per cent of IT professionals consider the service to be too pricey.

You can take this with either a glass half empty or half full mindset. Flip that number around and 54 per cent don’t have a problem with the price. In fact, almost 30 per cent of survey respondents said they intend to add or increase their workloads on the service over the next year. Why? In pursuit of those key advantages of scalability and cost optimization.

Now, Kirsch finished his article with what we consider to be a critically important observation in all this:

“The challenge that IT will face in the future isn’t migrating to the cloud. Rather, it’s keeping track of where workloads live. As virtual environments grow in size and complexity, it becomes harder to manage all the moving parts, such as VMs, containers and hosts.”

Helping MSPs help their enterprise clients address this very issue is what HyAlto is all about. Executing a successful enterprise strategy that takes full advantage of the cloud while also continuing to lever an enterprise’s existing on-premise data centre investment often requires dedicated expertise from outside the organization. Enterprises are increasingly looking for an MSP capable of serving as this one-stop partner.

AWS’s Carter made this point in her article and emphasized the need for an enterprise to evaluate the full capabilities of such a partner to support its long-term cloud strategy:

“In some cases, you may use a partner to help you with migration planning or modernization or even that upfront strategy planning,” she wrote. “But this is also a great time to now evaluate those partners. For instance, if you are migrating SAP over, you might want to choose a partner who has SAP competency. Or let’s say you’re doing Oracle or an IBM workload, you want to make sure that you have a partner who understands those workloads as well.”

At HyAlto, we are providing MSPs with the tools and the expertise to become that kind of multi-talented partner, to VMware Cloud on AWS and beyond.