Virtual Instruments Looks To Ease Partner Transactions Across Multi-Vendor IT Stacks

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."