The next generation of cloud MSPs
The cloud market is rapidly evolving, and managed service providers (MSPs) must quickly move beyond reselling to provide the next generation of cloud managed services. Customers no longer want individual tools for each cloud provider. Instead, they expect MSPs to build and deliver cloud-agnostic offerings for each step of their cloud journey: plan and design, build and migrate, run and operate, and optimize.
Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program
The Google Cloud Partner Advantage program differentiates partners by offering enablement tools and recognition of expertise that instill trust and demonstrate value with customers. Google includes partners in its cloud platform marketplace to help them generate more leads, secure larger deals, and grow revenue with Google Cloud offerings. Additional sales, marketing, business investment, and technical benefits are also made available to partners.
Partners can earn expertise and specialization designations from Google that further differentiate partners in the Google Cloud Marketplace. These designations can be achieved by creating teams of individuals that earn Google Cloud certifications and developing customer success stories that demonstrate experience with Google Cloud offerings. Specializations signify partners with the highest level of proficiency and technical ability who have established a proven and repeatable Google Cloud practice.
Google offers three engagement models through the program—sell, service and build—that are available at member, partner and premier levels. Qualifying for a given model requires a combination of Google credentials, annual business plans, customer success stories, product integrations, and/or minimum qualifying billings. Each engagement model is tailored toward a different type of partner.
The Partner Advantage Differentiation Journey
Google has outlined a Differentiation Journey for partners to best position themselves in offering Google Cloud services to customers. Following this journey will help partners achieve the expertise and specialization demonstrations that will set them apart in the Google Cloud Marketplace:
- Training and certification – Develop your team and complete Google Cloud certifications.
- Customer success – Accumulate documented success with customers to help Google better match you with the right opportunities.
- Expertise – Earn a designation that signals demonstrated experience and skills with the right combination of certifications and customer success stories.
- Specialization –Attain the highest achievable technical distinction with Google Cloud, signifying you are a top-tier industry pace-setter
Earn expertise and specialization designations from Google with VMware
VMware Aria Cost™ powered by CloudHealth® provides a multi-cloud financial management, or FinOps, solution for customers and partners. MSPs partner with us to help their customers accelerate business transformation in the cloud and offer unrivaled visibility, optimization and governance around cost and usage. VMware Aria Cost can also help partners in their journey to earn Google Cloud expertise and specialization designations.
MSPs can construct repeatable and successful service delivery portfolios by including VMware Aria Cost as an added value on top of Google Cloud products and services. Specifically, managed service providers can offer all the capabilities of the product through a single console, allowing them to streamline billing, centralize customer management, and drive profitability. VMware Aria Cost provides the ability for partners to manage their customers’ Google Cloud environments, and allows channel customers to be managed by partner while still being able to access the platform themselves.
Employing VMware Aria Cost to enhance cloud financial managemen and operations for your customers will enable you to construct the customer success stories required to earn expertise and specialization designations with Google. The following information details how VMware Aria Cost maps to specific Google Cloud expertise and specialization designations that set partners apart. The complete list of expertise and specialization designations can be found in the Google Cloud Partner Advantage portal.
Mapping VMware Aria Cost to expertise and specialization designations
VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth helps MSPs demonstrate capabilities across several Google Cloud expertise and specialization designations, helping them prove their success in building customer solutions with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services.
| Expertise area | How VMware helps |
| Google Cloud Compute Partners who demonstrate customer success in Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Build, Google Kubernetes Engine, Container Registry, Kubernetes, and Google Cloud Functions. |
VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth enables partners to manage, optimize, simplify and secure GCP compute resources for their customers. Partners can provide customers with greater visibility into their costs and usage, as well as recommendations on how to optimize their resources. The VMware Aria Cost container functionality helps you understand resource consumption at the service and cluster levels. It will help you understand which service or team is consuming what resources, so you can determine if you have the right set of resources, in the right locations, to properly support your cluster. Using the Container Module, you can optimize your resource clusters and discover opportunities to reduce spend through rightsizing and avoiding waste. |
| Google Cloud Identity and Security Partners who demonstrate customer success in Google Cloud Identity and Access Management, the Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention API, Google Cloud Key Management, Google Kubernetes Engine security, and Google Security Command Center. |
Starting with access management, partners can view and report across customer tenants, benefitting from full multitenant isolation of customers and the ability to grant platform access to customers as they see fit. Partners can manage customer users, roles and organizations through VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, as well as single sign-on access. FlexOrgs enable a hierarchical and segmented representation of an organization, with user access mapped to specific organizational units to control levels of access. |
| Cloud Migration – Services Demonstrated customer success in building foundational architectures and migrating significant numbers of customer workloads from either on-premises or other cloud providers to GCP. |
VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth has a migration assessment that analyzes the configuration and utilization of physical and virtual servers running in one or more data centers, and provides recommendations for moving a workload or a subset of infrastructure running the workload to GCP. Recommendations are made on Google Compute Engine types, region and associated projected costs. This allows partners to compare the TCO of running workloads on-premises with the public cloud, and make intelligent migration decisions related to redesigning applications for optimal efficiency in or across GCP regions. |
| Infrastructure – Services Demonstrated success assisting customers architect and build their GCP infrastructure and workflows. |
VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth is a third-party cloud management platform that supports GCP. It provides cost, usage and performance reporting with out-of-the-box reports and dashboards, and provides the ability to create custom reports and dashboards. With granular visibility across their GCP environment and assets, partners and customers can hold business groups and users accountable using chargeback and showback. The platform provides utilization and optimization capabilities via rightsizing recommendations and reservation management. Asset Reports give a more granular view of the billing data and help partners analyze cloud infrastructure VMware Aria Cost has governance policies to ensure compliance across resource types (e.g., tagging schema), and enable partners and customers to implement guardrails to govern their GCP environment. Partners can automate actions and workflows, and approve and authorize actions in a few clicks. Partners can take advantage of the platform’s ability to centralize customer management with visibility and reporting across all customer tenants from one console. The Partner Generated Billing function allows partners to generate billing statements for each of their customers while also incorporating customized billing rules based on their business agreements. |
| Security – Services Demonstrated significant success securing customer infrastructure and workflows to GCP. |
With VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, you can build policies to automate daily operational tasks, improve security, and maintain tagging hygien as you scale. Choose from a library of preconfigured policy templates or create your own to help manage your environment in a way that aligns to your business objectives. Trigger notifications to alert stakeholders of policy violations, such as when a resource is not configured as desired. |
Learn more
For more information about how you can become a best-in-class MSP with VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, please visit cloudhealth.vmware.com.
DOWNLOAD PDF View All Solution Briefs