UPDATED 13:00 EDT / MAY 26 2016

NEWS

Don’t lose your current customers; put them in a modern world | #SAPPHIRENOW

Beginning at a time where most enterprise customers were skeptical about cloud security, availability and management, thinking it would never workVirtustream, Inc., founded by Rodney Rogers and Kevin Reid, recognized an underserved market and an opportunity to install SAP and mission-critical applications on the cloud. They believed that there was a tremendous value proposition for the cloud in the future, and this has been their cornerstone for success.

Michael Hoch, senior VP at Virtustream, sat down with John Furrier (@furrier), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the recent SAP Sapphire 2016 event to talk about the company’s work with Service Integrators (SIs) and moving the enterprise to the cloud.

According to Hoch, Rogers and Reid focused on the underserved market segment for two reasons. “One, there was a huge value if it could work, and, two, they knew SAP could work,” he said. They believed white glove service was critical for enterprise applications to run in the cloud. Virtustream was started with a white glove service approach on an extreme platform designed to optimize I/O throughput. Employing this innovative solution model, the company grew.

The Virtustream/SI relationship

Hoch told Furrier that the company works with SIs in a couple of different ways. He explained that SIs are known for high-touch management application services, but, in general, when it comes to hosting companies they have different methodologies.

“So you have asset-heavy and asset light,” he said. “In the cloud world, we were able to come in easily to those asset-light situations, and now though our software we can help asset-heavy companies to build a full cloud model to support it.”

Hoch noted that it is still a hybrid world and someone needs to carry the assets, and that’s where Virtustream steps in — to own it at a high degree of efficiency, scalability and security.

Market trends

Another interesting trend Hoch talked about is the role of Independent Software Vendors (ISV).

“ISVs are looking like the service providers,” he said. ISVs want to move to a cloud-enabled something, maybe not full SaaS, but something. Then you’ve got full-service providers that need to look more like ISVs — software-solution driven. Either way you look at it, they all want to have a consumption-base infrastructure behind it.”

The customer’s challenge for developers

When asked about the challenge for developers, Hoch maintained, “They have to be agile, and even the global SIs you’re talking about, multi-billion dollar companies are getting pressured by their customers who say, ‘I want an all-in-one solution, and I want to pay for what I use.’ And their business models aren’t necessarily ready for that, so they are having to rethink how they are delivering innovation and what they are bringing to their customers. If they don’t do it, that customer is going to go to somebody who does.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SAP Sapphire 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

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