The tide has turned for smaller cloud service providers. They no longer fear that hyperscalers will swipe away every last one of their customers. They’re now in the center of a healthy ecosystem that includes their infrastructure providers, customers, and hyperscaler partners.

Why would enterprise IT organizations and small and medium-sized businesses snub the public-cloud giants?

“The answer is that vertical expertise is king here,” according to Kevin Shatzkamer (pictured, left), vice president and general manager of service provider solutions at Dell Technologies Inc. Public cloud is built for a lowest common denominator; customers bring their own differentiation, he added.

Certain industries have methods and practices ingrained into the way they do IT; retail is especially concerned with latency; healthcare is ruled by HIPAA, for example. Smaller cloud providers with vertical specializations can meet them closer to where they already are, so they can pick up in cloud where they left off on premises, Shatzkamer said.

“It’s not: ‘I’m building everything natively for public cloud.’ It’s: ‘I have an entire set of applications that were designed in my enterprise IT environment that I just want to find a new way to operate,'” he stated. 

Shatzkamer and Wade Holmes (pictured, right), director of technical product management at VMware Inc., spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed the new non-hyperscaler cloud ecosystem (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Consistency wins cloud customers and providers

Many enterprises may already be familiar with VMware Inc.’s virtualization technology and abstraction layer. “It’s really the path forward,” Shatzkamer said.

Dell Technologies Cloud on Dell EMC, a VMware abstraction with both vSphere and vCloud foundations, and Dell Technologies Cloud leveraging public cloud provide some common, foundational building blocks for all their services, according to Shatzkamer. 

VMware’s Cloud Provider Platform enables other cloud providers to build enterprise-ready services. The consistency of a single platform can simplify their operations, Shatzkamer added. “When the foundational building blocks all look different, [and the integration, automation, orchestration and storage look different], it was impossible. It’s really on us to provide an abstraction to make that easy for them,” he said. 

“The Cloud Provider Platform can be consumed in a pay-as-you-go subscription model, which is the way that providers want to be able to then provide software [and] capabilities to their enterprise customers,” Holmes concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE