When VMware announced its vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS), there were questions its adoption and how it would compete in the marketplace. In an interview for theCUBE at EMC World earlier this month, Mathew Lodge, VP of VMware vCHS, spoke with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman to address these matters.

Vellante noted that VMware has benefited from high degrees of homogeneity, putting forth a product with on-premise capabilities combined with the cloud piece of vCHS. However, it seemed the market wasn’t moving fast enough, and he believes the announcement was a way to catalyze adoption.

Lodge responded to Vellante’s perspective, saying the launch centered on two things; one was customer demand that VMware delivered as a cloud service, the other was because customers noted difficulty in extending current, public cloud infrastructures, as they were was radically different in terms their architecture and how applications were built. Lodge added that it was great for building a website for the first time or doing a brand new application, but that led to minor uptake in the enterprise because the challenge for them was transitioning to a new architecture.

Channel Partners and Customers

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Looking further into the VMware partner ecosystem, vCHS can be sold by the entire channel. The company ensured the first version of the service allowed channel partners to easily translate it in the same way they translated business with VMware today. This is particularly important for professional services, manu-services partners, value-added resellers, SIs and others who are taking cloud infrastructure as an ingredient and building a solution for a customer. EMC is also now selling vCHS. In fact, VMware already closed the first deals as result of that collaboration.

Regarding channel partners revenue, Lodge said they make money reselling the service, but the real opportunity is in helping customers turning that into a solution. He explained that if you’re a channel partner, in addition to looking at the infrastructure service, you need to manage the applications running on it. You need to perform tasks, like patching, upgrades and all other everyday run IT functions. That’s the crucial role that partners play. Another revenue example is Disaster Recovery (DR). vCHS is an easy-to-use, cost-effective service that you can install on your own. However, many organizations prefer someone else to install and manage it as well.

In terms of customers, vCHS is ahead of its forecast. Lodge added that DR has been a particularly popular starting point for many customers.

The competition

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Everybody likes to compare vCHS with Amazon. However, Miniman believes the more relevant comparison is Microsoft Azure. Microsoft has a cloud-first strategy. The company puts it into Azure in their public offering and then pushes it down to private. He then asked Lodge how vCHS stacks up there.

Lodge said it’s really about the applications. The challenge for hybrid cloud contenders is the breadth of applications support, and it’s one of the reasons vCHS’s DR service is a game-changer. It can support any application you run today, which is just not true of its competitors. This is a huge advantage and one of the key differentiators between vCHS and Azure.