Dive Brief:
- Infrastructure software vendor Virtuozzo updated its platform for delivering infrastructure-as-a-service and cloud offerings through the channel, according to an announcement last week. Virtuozzo Infrastructure System 8.0 adds updated Nvidia support for GPU workloads, including the R595 driver and vGPU v20 software, with an option for service providers to run the platform on a single server using local storage.
- Virtuozzo positions V/IS 8.0 as a flexible, affordable alternative to VMware. VMware customers have experienced significant price increases since Broadcom’s acquisition of the virtualization software provider, fueling widespread migration to competitors. The latest update makes the VMware migration tool generally available, according to the release.
- “There are a lot of people trying to move away from VMware by the end of March or June next year, so we want to make that as easy as possible,” Virtuozzo CEO Kurt Daniel told Channel Dive. “I think the VMware migration tool is hitting perfect timing, and we’re continuing to see acceleration in terms of adoption. Actually, 60% of our wins are coming from VMware, which is just a huge percentage. I’ve not seen that at another company, so the flight is real.”
Dive Insight:
Virtuozzo’s full-stack platform enables partners to offer infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, AI-as-a-service and database-as-a-service under one console with one pricing model, Daniel said.
The vendor, which has over 1,000 partners, updated its global partner program in early October, expanding discounts and rebates, training and certification and market development funds. Daniel said Virtuozzo is targeting service providers seeking to meet demand for AI and GPU-as-a-service.
“Our partners can all become AI companies, and in fact, at least several dozen have already done this with us very quietly over the past several months,” Daniel said. “Over time, every one of these partners will become AI companies, at least in a modest way, because they're renting out GPUs, they're doing GPUs-as-a-service or AI-as-a-service. They're not Claude or OpenAI, but they're AI companies nonetheless.”
Virtuozzo’s new lite deployments let service providers who support small hosting deployments, branch offices and factory locations run compute, management and storage on a single node, with VM workloads using local disks instead of a shared storage network, per the release. A V/IS with one-server setup can deliver approximately 53% lower total cost of ownership than VMware, according to Virtuozzo calculations.
Partners are looking for alternatives to VMware products. “Organizations now face immediate budget pressures that require strategic responses rather than automatic renewals,” Director of Product Management at data protection and recovery company Trilio Kevin Jackson wrote in a whitepaper. “The calculations show that staying with VMware under the new VMware license price structure means either accepting substantially higher costs or exploring alternative infrastructure platforms.”
For the vendor’s global partners, a single-server strategy appeals to government and enterprise customers who care about data location and control. Daniel said Asia-Pacific partner Cloud PE reportedly earns up to eight times more revenue from a single server using GPU-as-a-service, compared to traditional cloud services.
Daniel expects demand for GPU-as-a-service to keep growing, potentially slowing as the market matures. He also anticipates more competition for neo-cloud players from hyperscalers and networks of small and midsize channel partners.
“SaaS was like a 20-year trend and it’s still going strong,” he said. “The cloud service provider trend really started around the 90s, and that's still going strong. If SaaS and cloud hosting were a 20-plus-year trend, AI is going to be a 30-, 40-, 50-year-plus trend. It'll probably never go away, just like these other technologies.”
