What VMware’s Cloud Partner Navigator Means for the Channel

Over the past couple years, VMware has ramped up its multicloud efforts. Much of that has come with a focus on the channel and how partners can help customers implement the most effective cloud environments. To aid in those efforts, VMware recently made Cloud Partner Navigator, first announced last September at VMworld, fully available.

Channel Futures wanted to understand more about the portal, so we conducted a Q&A with a VMware channel executive. (Hint: VMware bills the interface as a “major milestone” in helping partners embrace multicloud opportunities. And it requires transitioning from Cloud Provider Hub.)

Before diving into all that, though, take it from a peer: VMware Cloud Partner Navigator is simple. It puts VMware and public cloud setups into one interface. And that means fulfilling client requests faster, said Ryan Boyce, director of network engineering at Effectual.

“The Cloud Partner Navigator allows our teams to easily enable our customers’ cloud experience without having to remember complex navigation paths to find the right resources,” Boyce told Channel Futures.

To be clear, the portal serves as a tool. It is not itself a product. Rather, it enables channel partners – cloud providers and MSPs alike – to beef up their offerings through VMware’s SaaS portfolio. They deliver new, different services more quickly and easily. Of interest, however, is that partners can roll out the Navigator to their customers for self-management, if that’s a fit.

To understand it in more depth, we caught up with Geoff Thompson, vice president of worldwide cloud provider sales at VMware. Here is our edited exchange.

Channel Futures: Describe VMware Cloud Partner Navigator. What is it, what does it do, and what do partners do with it?

VMware’s Geoff Thompson

Geoff Thompson: Cloud Partner Navigator is a SaaS platform that helps VMware partners simplify and accelerate multicloud service delivery. [It was] built specifically for partners to help them expand their business by integrating delivery of VMware Cloud infrastructure as a service with VMware’s … SaaS services.

Cloud Partner Navigator provides three key benefits for partners:

• Service Delivery: With Cloud Partner Navigator, partners can provide their customers easy access to cloud services. They can purchase, provision and operate these services from a unified platform while providing a common, automated onboarding process across different services.
• Cloud Operations: Partners can use it to expand to various cloud endpoints, unify views across clouds and deliver common automation across clouds.
• Customer Experience: The end customer gets access to the tenant side of Cloud Partner Navigator where they can enjoy self-service deployment of VMs and containers to their cloud endpoint of choice. They can also view centralized billing across the services and view cloud usage from a unified platform.

CF: What spurred VMware to develop VMware Cloud Partner Navigator?

GT: VMware Cloud Partner Navigator is a key milestone in our multicloud strategy. It enables us to help partners build a competitive cloud portfolio, simplify their business expansion, and unify services and operations with a common platform. Our vision for [it] is to …