Companies with cold feet about relocating on-premises applications to the public cloud may need a common denominator to warm them up. For on-prem-to-cloud specialist SkyTap Inc., the go-between is VMware Inc.’s virtual machine technology.

“A lot of our customers have applications that they don’t want to touch,” says Roger Frey (pictured, left), vice president of alliances and business development at SkyTap, which typically begins relationships with customers by taking an inventory of their application stacks. They are often surprised to find that the same technology they’ve used on-prem for years — VMware — can lift and shift their apps to cloud, Frey explained.

Frey joined Geoff Waters (pictured, right), vice president of cloud sales at VMware, for a live interview during VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. VMware recently named SkyTap a premier partner in the VMware Cloud Provider Program. The companies are blending customer feedback into VM and cloud solutions.

“It’s not just about the VMware install base. It’s also working with them on different cloud tools, leveraging that, integrating it into all the different technologies across the board,” Waters told Peter Burris (@plburris) and Lisa Martin (@LisaDaliMartin), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud efficiency makeover

SkyTap’s concentration on migrating on-prem legacy apps differentiates it from the public cloud majority, according to Frey. “They’re really geared for net new development — born in the cloud applications, mobile, things like that,” he said.

Organizations like hospitals, insurance companies and banks may have applications written five or 10 years ago dependent on outmoded hardware. SkyTap drills down from the apps’ surface to layer 2 networking to gauge virtualization potentials. “Things that they thought would have to stay on-prem, they can actually now take to the cloud and enjoy those efficiencies,” Frey said.

Such efficiencies include go-to-market agility and self-service, as well as greater enablement of employees worldwide. “We can clone images of our customers’ environments; we can ship them globally. So you may have a team in San Francisco; you may have a team in Seattle; you may have a team in Tokyo,” Frey stated.

SkyTap is a case study in VMware’s increasing pivot toward developing products and services for service providers, Waters explained. The company works with service providers to productize VMware technologies around the customer feedback loop, he added.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor SkyTap Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE