Specialty IT vendors are no doubt feeling the heat from the exploding cloud infrastructure world. After all, why would a business want to purchase a jumble of IT separately when they could get it all in one neat cloud package that is managed for them to boot? But an equally interesting question is, why would you give up management of your own environment when you could order cloud services a la carte? One company is enabling its partners to make that proposition.

George Hope, VP of Global Channels at SimpliVity Corp., spoke about how his copmany keeps its partners competitive amid rapid fire innovation. He told Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016 how SimpliVity enables VARs (value-added-resellers) to add as-a-service cloud offerings to their portfolios.

He said that with a few smart cloud additions, it’s possible for vendors of single services like storage to compete with the public cloud.

Have your stack and eat it too

“We give them the ability to give their customers the economics of what the cloud would offer, but still that control, efficiency, elasticity, performance and everything that they would potentially give up if they went to the cloud,” he said.

Adding choice back in

Hope said that SimpliVity is unique in the hyper-converged sphere for a number of reasons. “It’s not really intuitive, what we do,” he stated. One differentiator is the company’s willingness to let partners break up the OmniCube (SimpliVity’s fully integrated hyper-converged infrastructure appliance) and buy their servers from a vendor of their choice.

He said his company wants to offer more choice without breaking the simplification promise of hyper-converged. “We can’t get away with complicating channels if we’ve set out to simplify IT,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE