Virtual Instruments Wednesday upgraded its VirtualWisdom platform with a set of vendor-agnostic packages designed to make it easier for partners to deliver comprehensive artificial intelligence-powered IT monitoring and optimization offerings tailored to the needs of its enterprise customers.
With the latest release, the San Jose, Calif.-based startup set its sights on streamlining channel distribution through WisdomPacks—six integrated SKUs that remove licensing and other transaction headaches when implementing and changing technology stacks.
"WisdomPacks we put in place for the channel," Paul Brodie, Virtual Instruments' vice president of global channel sales, told CRN. "We wanted to vastly simplify consumption and delivery of VirtualWisdom in the channel."
[Related: Virtual Instruments Acquires Metricly, Expanding Public Cloud Reach]
The channel-friendly feature comes more than a year after Virtual Instruments overhauled its partner program with major structural changes to enhance partner profitability.
Channel-led revenue has more than doubled year over year since that change at the start of 2018—and the company is now looking to further accelerate channel sales, Brodie said.
The WisdomPacks mark "Phase 2" of that channel transformation, he told CRN.
Ryan Perkowski, Virtual Instruments’ senior director of product management, said the WisdomPacks are designed to knock down obstacles partners face when selling monitoring solutions to customers that have deployed complex, hybrid and multi-vendor environments.
Each of the six WisdomPacks encompasses one particular technology vertical, with licensing, pricing, invoice generation and other transaction elements remaining consistent, regardless of specific vendors.
For example, the Server Virtualization SKU doesn't care whether it's used on VMware's vCenter, Microsoft Hyper-V or KVM-based infrastructure.
Other WisdomPacks do the same for Storage Area Networks, Operating Systems, Enterprise Storage, Storage Wire Data and Software-Defined Storage.
Enterprise buyers, looking to avoid lock-in, are creating heterogenous data centers to power their applications, and their monitoring solutions should be flexible to changes across that infrastructure, Perkowski said.
Other monitoring solutions get in the way of customers switching vendors and stacks. "We thought that was kind of ridiculous," Perkowski said.
Instead, WisdomPacks are "like buying tokens, and you can apply those tokens to any technology in the stack."
The corresponding 10X reduction in the number of Virtual Instruments SKUs gives partners logistical flexibility, Brodie told CRN, and is also a selling point in the notion of future-proofing their monitoring solution.
"It can bend and mold and move wherever they want. It's not a re-negotiation at that point. To the end user it’s a very seamless operation," he said.
The WisdomPacks are "bucketed in areas that are usually the sweet spots of what our partners are going to market with," Brodie said. "It’s a vast simplification."
related stories
trending stories
Video
sponsored resources

NetApp
NetApp Data Driven Learning Center

Vertiv
Edge Computing 360

Best of Breed Showcase

Annual Report Card Showcase

NexGen Showcase

Cloud PPG Showcase

100 People You Should Know Showcase

APC by Schneider Electric
IoT Platforms 360

Silver Peak
Silver Peak Learning Center

Veeam
Veeam

NPD
Industry Trends 360

Comcast
Comcast Business Learning Center

AT&T Cybersecurity
Cloud Security 360

ConnectWise
ConnectWise

Symantec
Symantec Business Security Learning Center

RSA
RSA

Micro Focus
Enterprise Application Software 360

Eaton
Eaton Learning Center

BlackBerry Cylance
BlackBerry Cylance Learning Center

Storagecraft
Disaster Recovery Learning Center

Lenovo
Lenovo Learning Center

ID Agent
Managed Security 360

Wasabi
Wasabi

Sophos
Sophos Cybersecurity Learning Center

Scale Computing
Scale Computing Learning Center

SonicWall
Network Security 360

Cohesity
Cohesity Learning Center

Dell EMC
Software-defined Data Center 360

Sherweb
Cloud Partner Programs 360
