Service providers are great assists in a company’s overall cloud strategy — but at some point, companies may acquire more than they can keep a grasp on. To earn their keep, service providers ought to be automating and managing complex migration and hybrid tasks on customers’ behalf.

“This whole cloud operations is becoming a major problem, as we have eight to 10 global service providers in most enterprises,” said Geoff Waters (pictured, right), vice president of global cloud sales at VMware Inc. “Reducing the complexity of that is incredibly important.”

VMware has announced a number of offerings around automation of the data center. They essentially deliver VMware as a service, and it’s funneling them to its service provider channel, which includes partners like cloud-based infrastructure service provider OVH US LLC.

Waters and David Wigglesworth (pictured, left), chief revenue officer of OVH, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed OVH and VMware’s nine-year-old partnership and simplifying interclouding and workload migration. (* Disclosure below.)

OVH services are built on the full VMware software-defined data center stack, including vSphere, vSAN and NSX virtualized networking. The seven-time VMware service-provider-of-the-year winner is at the fore of VMware’s cloud strategy, according to Waters.

All apps on board (and off again)

Migration, automation and maintenance of hybrid cloud operations are where OVH shines, according to Waters. OVH leverages VMware tools like HCX Hybrid Cloud Extension to move virtual machines to the cloud. “A lot of these data centers, as the different leases are coming up, they want to get out of there,” he said. “We’ve had some customers that have migrated hundreds of VMs over a weekend.”

HCX makes moving workloads between on-prem and off-prem environments via a network connection easier, Wigglesworth explained. “We see customers moving workloads back and forth. It depends on seasonality,” he said.

Retail customers may send apps to the cloud at the height of the holiday season and pull them back on-prem afterwards. Using open-source infrastructure platform OpenStack allows OVH to be infrastructure agnostic, Wigglesworth added.

“So it doesn’t really matter what cloud’s out there. We can interface with it,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: OVH US LLC sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. OVH, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE