Customers are demanding more and more technologies be delivered as a service. It’s not just infrastructure commodities like storage and compute; it’s also well-honed solutions like data protection. VMware Inc. and Dell EMC are working to deliver data protection as a service to cloud providers themselves, who in turn deliver it to their customers.

At last year’s VMworld, VMware, Dell EMC and Telefonica S.A. formed a three-way deal to provide a turnkey solution that allows cloud providers to deliver data protection as a service. Telefonica is a good example of the kind of company that can make good use this type of service. The Spanish multinational broadband and telecommunications provider does not intend to compete with Amazon Web Service Inc. with its virtual infrastructure services.

“Our strategy is not to compete with the hyperscaler providers,” said Sandro Bertelli (pictured, right), regional IT infrastructure manager at Telefonica. The company wants to offer customers things like easy user interfaces and no-hassle self-service. It accomplishes this with tools like VMware’s Virtual Data Center, which offers much in the way of self-service, according to Bertelli.

“It’s not just an infrastructure as a service platform. It’s an everything as a service platform,” he said.

Bertelli and Colin Durocher (pictured, left), product manager at Dell EMC, 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 the benefit of value-added services to infrastructure providers and VMware’s self-service cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Come for infra, stay for user experience

Service providers like Telefonica are under a lot of pressure to differentiate themselves, according to Durocher. “A cloud provider that only offers infrastructure as a service — they’re getting their margins squeezed, right? So they have to bring in these value-added services,” he said. “They differentiate themselves through a better user experience, which means the way the user interacts with the product.” 

VMware’s vCloud intuitive cloud provisioning and consumption platform helps Telefonica deliver a better user experience, Bertelli explained. Particularly, the latest releases are putting earlier ones to shame.

“The old user interface was very ugly to our customers. So right now, vCloud director 9.1 and 9.x  is a very good interface — in the same way, improving the user experience in the quality of our services,” Bertelli 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: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. Dell, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE