FD Insights Issue 4 | Page 22

Talking Cloud with Bart
Schneider, EMEA vCloud
Partner Manager for
VMware
Bart Schneider is the Manager for vCloud Partners Northern EMEA, and as such is ideally
placed to talk about VMware’s cloud journey. Whilst Bart was on business in Cape Town,
Tristan Penver caught up with him to talk about VMware’s move towards hybrid cloud.
“Hybrid cloud is the way in which not only VMware is
moving, but the IT sector as a whole,” says Bart. “We are
already seeing in global markets, including Europe, quicker
migration to the hybrid cloud than what we are experiencing
here in South Africa, mainly due to a lack of technological
restrictions particularly with regards to bandwidth constraints,” he says. “That said, South Africa’s time is coming.”
As a refresher, hybrid cloud is the composition of at least
one private cloud and at least one public cloud. The hybrid
cloud computing environment is an environment where an
organisation provides and manages internal computing
resources (aka private cloud) and other computing resources are provided externally (public cloud). With the correct
architecture and security in place, this allows a customer
to ‘move’ workloads between both public and private cloud
computing resources.
Bart explains that hybrid cloud is currently one of the main
focuses for VMware globally, and its adoption has really
accelerated due to the economic crisis where customers
just don’t have the capital to invest in new and expensive
hardware such as datacentres, and instead are starting to
consume Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS). VMware foresees more and more IT
services being moved to the cloud but realises that this is a
long-term process and are thus enabling the transition pro-

cess through their vCloud Hybrid Service. Many customers
are already using cloud services such as Gmail, Facebook
and MS Office 365, and many of the negative perceptions
around cloud are fast eroding.
The vCloud Hybrid Service mentioned above is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud built and operated by
VMware. According to Bill Fathers, general manager of
Hybrid Cloud Services, it’s built on the same platform that
VMware customers use in their own datacentres, and is
designed for customers who have expressed a desire for
a cloud offering that is completely compatible with what
they are deploying internally. vCloud Hybrid Service was
designed to support all of their existing applications as well
as the development of any new ones – without requiring
any changes.
Bart indicated that the service will be rolled out in other
markets such as the US and EMEA first, before coming to
South Africa in Q1 of 2014
VMware plans to make the vCloud Hybrid Service technology and IP available to its service provider partners, and
believes its experience operating a cloud service will allow it
to more rapidly deliver innovations to partners in the coming
months and years.

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel [phone] Fax [phone] www.vmware.com

Copyright © 2013 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed
at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be
trademarks of their respective companies.

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