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Virtualization and cloud infrastructure specialist VMware (NYSE: VMW), introduced the vCloud Integration Manager, a platform designed to help service providers automate the delivery and operations of VMware vCloud Director -based clouds. vCloud Integration Manager is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2012 and will be priced on a usage-based subscription model familiar to vCloud Service Providers.
vCloud Integration Manager software is designed to allow service providers to create and deploy cloud service offerings, operate at an improved efficiency level and scale to meet customer demand in a repeatable and cost-effective manner. vCloud Integration Manager aims to help service providers accelerate time to revenue and simplify operations to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
vCloud Integration Manager will be integrated with vCloud Director, vSphere, vShield Edge and vCenter Chargeback Manager to automate and accelerate the provisioning and delivery of infrastructure and associated services. vCloud Integration Manager will provide a REST-based API to integrate with a service providers back office systems (CRM, billing, etc.), and a Web-based administration portal.
The platform will also include Web-based portals to streamline and automate service plan, customer lifecycle and reseller management. With the click of a button, service providers will be able to standardize product configuration and delivery, manage customer lifecycles from sign-up to decommission, and reduce the time and overhead involved in transacting with resellers.
“Service providers are looking to get high-margin cloud services to market as quickly as possible,” said Mathew Lodge, senior director of cloud services for VMware. “Until now, that involved wrangling manual processes, diverting scarce development resources onto writing glue code and portals, or choosing to implement complex and expensive third-party systems. With vCloud Integration Manager, providers of vCloud services will have the tools they need to automatically provision services, enable reseller partners and speed customer on-boarding.”
VMware also announced that nearly 90 service provider partners now offer services that have met VMware criteria as vCloud Powered, an almost threefold increase since Q3 2011. The vCloud Powered program requires the companys Service Provider Program (VSPP) partners to offer services based on vSphere and vCloud Director while exposing the vCloud API and supporting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). Compliance with these requirements helps ensure that vCloud Powered services offer customers on-demand access to virtual infrastructure from a public cloud, a secure and robust platform, and application and API portability between their internal data centers and the vCloud Powered services of their choice.
Providers of vCloud Powered services are based in the United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa and the United Kingdom, catering to a variety of use cases, ranging from compute resources for pre-production environments to seasonal and transient workloads to disaster recovery in the cloud.