VMware announced today that it is now offering a new service called vCloud Service.

A few people asked me today – why? What does this mean? vCloud is already offered by a large number of partners all over the world – so what is the (if any) added value that me – the customer gets from this and also where is the benefit here for VMware?

vCloud Service is after all being run by one of VMware’s partners after all.

So why?

After thinking a bit about this – here is where I see added value (both for the customer and VMware).

VMware has a large vCloud Ecosystem in over 28 countries around the world.

So let’s take a look into this ecosystem for a moment.

The majority of the providers do not offer a try-before-you-buy option. The reason being… actually I am not sure why not. Perhaps it is not financially viable to for them to provide such a service, perhaps these partners assume that someone who wants to sign up for their service – will have already done their homework in advance so no trial is needed.

But even those who do have a “test-drive” option available – it still is not a simple process (just by the way – out of the 145 vendors stated on the post above – only 18 are ones that you can “test-drive” – world-wide!)

Carenza, Bitbrains, Cyso, Earthlink, iland, NTT comunications, Onyx, Proserve, Qube, Skyscape, Techgate, Zitcom – I checked all of these providers and none of them have the option to sign up quickly with a short process, everything is done manually. Leave you details – and we will get back to you – in 24/48 hours or up till 7 days. Some of these providers will not even allow individuals to test out services only registered companies.

Have you ever tried to sign up with amazon for AWS? Why is it that AWS is the most widely used Public cloud vendor in the world? Well…

1. You have a 100% free tier – for 1 year (new customers)
2. Sign up is instantaneous – all that is verified is your phone number – 100% automated  for any Joe Shmoe…

The sign-up and setup process is a breeze (you can see how here)

So here is the VMware added value with this new service.

For the customer – they can actually try out vCloud probably just as fast as they can try out AWS.

For VMware they get the exposure to the end user – they will try out vCloud – see the product and then once the customer sees the benefit – will either deploy in-house or purchase the full service from a provider. Much like the vSphere Hypervisor which is 100% free – but once you get used to it and you want full functionality you purchase vSphere Std/Ent/Ent with vCenter.

So perhaps the rumors about Project Zephyr (and that VMware are starting to go into direct competition to AWS) have some truth in them, time will tell.

The only thing I do not understand though – is why I have to pay for a Beta service – perhaps this will change when the service goes into direct competition with AWS, GCE, and other Public cloud providers.

You can sign up for the Beta here.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts about this in the comments below.