Verizon Take Multi-Cloud Vision a Step Further with Cloud Marketplace

Verizon (News - Alert) Enterprise Solutions has officially launched its Verizon Cloud Marketplace, and the move may well herald a new way of doing business in the cloud. Like most cloud marketplaces, the new offering provides pre-built cloud services from a variety of vendors that are accessible using Verizon Cloud environments.

Verizon has taken a middle-of-the-road approach to the cloud, which it has branded a multi-cloud services model, commonly referred to as a hybrid cloud approach. The company offers its own public and private cloud infrastructure, and public cloud IaaS has proven to be the most profitable component of Verizon’s offerings thus far, generating about 85 percent of the company’s cloud revenue.

But Verizon, like many service and colocation providers, understands the importance of the cloud infrastructure bigwigs and also offers an on-ramp to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Equinix (News - Alert), which is where the multi-cloud model comes into play. Verizon isn’t the only provider initiating on-ramps to AWS and Microsoft, and massive service providers like Equinix, Level 3, NTT and XO Communications (News - Alert) are doing the same.

This approach of playing nice with all the major infrastructure players has worked well for Verizon thus far, and the new Verizon Cloud Marketplace will take that strategy to another level by layering value-added software services over that infrastructure. The goal of the marketplace, like all marketplaces, is to create a one-stop shop for cloud services and Verizon will offer solutions from AppDynamics, Hitachi (News - Alert), Juniper, pfSense and Tervela for starters. Verizon is also offering a portfolio of its own cloud onboarding services to simplify migration of workloads and applications to the cloud.

“The launch of Verizon Cloud Marketplace is an important milestone in the ongoing evolution of our cloud ecosystem,” said Siki Giunta, senior vice president of cloud services, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “Verizon Cloud Marketplace is all about simplifying and streamlining migration to the cloud, and enterprises using Verizon Cloud will now have access to a growing number of industry-leading cloud-based applications required to power their businesses in the digital age.”