“Everyone talks about the journey to cloud as if it’s the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, but the closer we think we’re getting, the further away it moves.”
So said VMware’s Sub-Saharan Africa cloud provider manager, Dave Funnell. He was speaking last week in Sandton where VMware held a briefing on their verified cloud provider programme (VCPP) and its first African VCPP partner, Routed Hosting.
Routed was announced as a VCPP in November last year.
In order to become a verified provider, Funnell said partners need to ‘build a mirror image of a private cloud stack that a client could build themselves on their own premises’.
“Routed works as a managed service provider, delivering VMware solutions for multi-cloud that are developed by us, delivered as SaaS. But the partner can white label them and incorporate them into their own servers.”
Routed also provides a disaster recovery (DR) service to Altron's division Altech Card Solutions (ACS).
Mira Andric, ACS operations and delivery manager, said: “We provide the secure hosting of transactional data and applications which contain a significant amount of private and critical information. We provide customers with a self-service portal, and given the sensitivity of this data, it must always be available.”
ACS implemented VCloud and shipped over 30TB of data within two weeks.
Routed MD Andrew Cruise, said: “Because ACS runs VMware inside their data centre and they themselves are a VCPP, it made sense to deliver a solution that combines our respective expertise in the VMware ecosystem. ACS is quite forward-thinking to approach another service provider partner to deliver a best-of-breed offering rather than try do everything themselves.”
According to Cruise, ACS can also deliver this solution to companies outside the Altron Group.
“We see a hybrid muti-cloud world with VMware supplying the management around it, as well as the infrastructure platform for traditional three-tier applications," said Funnell. "We want to give our customers freedom and choice – customer-managed private cloud and localised cloud, all fit for purpose, wherever workloads may end up.”