More and more, enterprises realize they can’t manage and maintain their IT footprint as it grows in complexity and scope. Due to their lack of capacity and expertise, they look to managed service providers (MSPs) for support. As the market continues to move in this direction, MSPs have a huge opportunity in front of them to step in with high-value, scalable offerings that will help customers throughout their journey to the public cloud.

IDC’s Worldwide Managed Cloud Services Forecast expects a 15.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in worldwide managed cloud services spending through 2025, highlighting how enterprises increasingly look to cloud MSPs to support them across an increasingly diverse and expanding volume of IT assets, cloud resources, IT processes, and geographic locations.1


Seizing the opportunity as a service provider in the public cloud

It all boils down to your bottom line. What can you do to significantly improve margins and capitalize on one of the largest business opportunities in the history of IT? To monetize the public cloud, you must build and deliver cloud-agnostic offerings, from migration through optimization.

Your success hinges on your ability to provide differentiated value to your customers while keeping up with evolving cloud technology. That means transforming for the new cloud-centric world and having the tools and resources in place that enable you to boost efficiency, differentiate your offerings, and increase profitability. A centralized cloud management solution can simplify customer management, streamline billing, and improve your margins by delivering value-added services to your customers who don’t have the time or expertise.

What to look for in your cloud management solution

It is imperative to find a platform that integrates with the leading public cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), as well as resources in the data center, such as VMware. Ensure there is R&D commitment for continued multi-cloud support. Your solution should offer a consolidated hub with robust analytics, integrated reporting, optimization recommendations, and policy-based governance and automation. In addition, your cloud management provider should offer a comprehensive set of benefits that include support for onboarding, technical setup and review, service package design, training, go-to-market support, and sales enablement for your team.

Are you not getting the full value needed from your current cloud management solution to support your customers throughout the cloud adoption lifecycle? Is your current solution presenting challenges with data integrity, such as rounding errors or lack of billing accuracy? Or maybe you’re noticing performance degradation or issues with scalability as your customers’ and your own environments grow. These limitations have also been felt by your peers, and we’re here to offer you reasons to make the switch to VMware Aria Cost™ powered by CloudHealth®, including a comprehensive and proven transition plan with incentives.

Why partner with VMware

VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth is the most trusted software platform for accelerating global business transformation in the cloud. The platform provides robust functionality and optimization across on-premises, public, hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Hundreds of partners around the world depend on VMware Aria Cost to deliver services that bring value to their customers who don’t have the time or expertise.

As a VMware partner, you gain access to a team of experts dedicated to driving your success. We will help design new service packages and develop strategies to increase your margins. The power of the VMware Aria Cost platform will enable you to gain visibility, optimize cloud resources, and implement business policies to facilitate governance of your clients’ clouds.

VMware is committed to helping partners become next-generation service providers by advancing their offerings and business. All partners are provided with recommendations and best practices for packaging and selling cloud managed services, powered by VMware Aria Cost. Examples include tiered offerings with features such as rightsizing and Reserved Instance management. There are also templates for add-on services, such as health checks.

Additionally, partners can leverage VMware Aria Cost to align to industry frameworks, such as the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and pass various industry audits, such as the AWS MSP and Azure Expert MSP validations, by demonstrating capabilities across several sections and mandatory requirements.

Key benefits of VMware Aria Cost

Centralize customer management

Gain visibility and reporting across all customer tenants from one console.

Streamline billing

Gain visibility and reporting across all customer tenants from one console.

Drive profitability

Identify and take advantage of opportunities to increase your profit margins.

Manage and operate at scale

  • Consolidate, aggregate and invoice customer cloud spend.
  • Manage margins via markup/markdown and arbitrage.
  • Integrate with general ledger, custom price books, and invoicing systems.
  • Automate onboarding and customer entitlement via APIs.
  • Leverage predictive recommendation engines.
  • Maximize recurring revenue streams with organic and VMware Aria Cost driven growth.

Extend your service portfolio

  • Customized reporting by business groups, called Perspectives
  • Cost, usage and performance management reporting
  • Customer health checks
  • Optimization recommendations (e.g., reservation management)
  • Governance policy management
  • Migration assessments to the cloud

Success story directly from your peers

SMX decided to make the switch and chose VMware Aria Cost to support customer demand and the need to analyze hundreds of millions of cloud events per month. SMX required a cost management and governance platform built for multi-cloud environments. Further, with multiple customer accounts on various bills, SMX needed a solution that would enable them to see account costs broken out, but within a consolidated view.

Once the decision was made to partner with VMware, the SMX service offerings were augmented, granting customers access to the VMware Aria Cost platform. This access has empowered customers to benefit from cost optimization dashboards, Reserved Instance purchasing capabilities and rightsizing features, as well as automated governance policies for improved tagging. Customers have also leveraged the VMware Aria Cost security functionality, as well as its related training and development services.

Learn more

Visit cloudhealth.vmware.com for more information and to start your free trial.

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Partners should look for a cloud management solution that:

  • Integrates with multiple clouds and on-premises resources, and demonstrates research and development (R&D) commitment to continued support
  • Provides a consolidated hub with robust analytics, integrated reporting, optimization recommendations, and policybased governance and automation 
  • Offers comprehensive benefits, including support for onboarding, technical setup and review, service package design, go-to-market support, and sales enablement
 
Our ability to seamlessly manage multiple cloud environments for our customers, while continuously adding value without spending time on undifferentiated tasks, is paramount to our success. [The VMware Aria Cost team] policy-driven approach to cloud management, coupled with its automation capabilities, enables us to offer stronger levels of service for our customers, especially in highly dynamic environments.
Alex Beal Product Manager, Cloud Products SHI
With [VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth], we have been able to deliver extraordinary customer value. We are empowered with the insights we need to drive business outcomes for our customers, no matter where they are in their cloud journey. Further, over the last 12 months, [VMware Aria Cost] has enabled us to save over $2.5 million for our customers
Claudia Couzi General Manager of Operational Services AC3
SMX chose to partner with [VMware] based on [VMware Aria Cost] data integrity, infrastructure stability, performance track record, and team expertise.
Eric Jerasa Manager of Business Operations SMX

^1^IDC. “Worldwide Managed Cloud Services Forecast, 2021-2025: An Extraction View of Technology Outsourcing Services Markets.” September 2021.