Prosimo, the company launched in 2021 by Viptela's co-founders, is out to disrupt multicloud networking.
And it wants system integrators, managed service providers and value-added resellers to join the movement.
What movement is that, exactly? One that "democratizes" (in the words of one industry analyst) the ability to connect one or more public clouds while delivering complete visibility into each environment.
As such, Prosimo on June 28 debuted what it's calling its Multicloud Foundation. To be clear, though, the effort is not an alliance, as "foundation" so often means. In this case, "foundation" refers to the basic ability to do multicloud networking — particularly with ease. Some examples of specific resources and outcomes Prosimo says enterprises can expect include the following:
- Discovery of and "full visibility" into cloud inventory.
- AWS, Google VPC/Azure VNet connectivity.
- Route visibility and troubleshooting.
- Policy control.
- Traceability.
- Diagnostic tools.
Prosimo is offering all of that for free to enterprises, through channel partners and directly. Why? Because the company aims to commoditize what it calls the first stage of cloud adoption, or "agile networking" (not to be confused with telecom services). It very deliberately is hoping to force the market to help organizations go from trying to manage different public clouds separately to delivering an all-in-one model so IT experts can instead focus on innovation.
‘This Isn't a Gimmick'
And, again, it's doing so at no charge.
"This isn't a gimmick," Nathan Pearce, director of product marketing, told Channel Futures.
Multicloud networking – getting disparate clouds to talk to one another — is "table stakes," he asserted (or, should be, anyway. The process, outside of Prosimo, has stayed stuck in manual effort that takes hours and weeks out of IT experts' days.). The true value of cloud computing lies in the layers above connectivity, Pearce said. But Prosimo contends that IT remains at stage one because cloud providers don't want their technologies to talk to one another.
"It's just not in their interest to do that," Pearce said.
However, Prosimo can step in "because we manage the native resources of each and the nuances between them," he explained.
To wit, Prosimo says its new multicloud networking solution connects environments from Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and data centers including Equinix — in seven minutes.
Furthermore, per Prosimo, beta testing has indicated that the Multicloud Foundation saves organizations a "significant" amount of money. And when users adopt Prosimo's "advanced" platforms in addition to the free version, they can trim total cloud costs by 30-50%, the company said.
Of course, that's the key. Offering free multicloud networking acts to draw in paid customers (which will benefit channel partners, too). Yet even if an organization doesn't want to move up the cloud stack, that's OK. Prosimo's Multicloud Foundation "is going to be free forever," said Mani Ganesan, vice president of product. "And you can onboard 1,000 accounts if you want."
It's just that unlocking the innovation of cloud computing requires going beyond streamlining multiple platforms, and that constitutes Prosimo's ultimate goal. Along the way, the vendor hopes to capture market share. Customers can opt for additional paid tiers (and they do not have to do so in any linear fashion). Those are: zero-trust network access; service networking, featuring application, PaaS and network interconnectivity, among other capabilities; and enterprise-level requirements including egress control across providers.
Impact on Channel Partners
Providing free multicloud networking will bring "huge" impact to SIs, MSPs and VARs, Ganesan said.
"I can take Prosimo Foundation, I can white-label that, I can add any layer to it, and then go and tell enterprises, 'Give me 30 minutes … to onboard your cloud accounts into this,'" he said. "That's a disruptive model where they can walk in and insert this into every single conversation they're having today."
Customers will understand how much money they've overspent on different tools as they've sought to connect multiple clouds. Then they can trim what no longer works as Prosimo's multicloud networking solution kicks in. From there, "they can actually start going up the stack [they've] desperately been trying to get to," Pearce noted.
And, sure, there's a small question of whether partners could be cannibalizing some of their own services. The answer, said Navjyoti Sharma, senior director of product management at Prosimo, is yes. But, he said, "there is this entire stack that you can seamlessly move to without changing anything. I mean, the stack is there, it's in the customer's environment. All you need to do is just enable those outcomes and delight your customer."
In other words, think beyond the first stage of cloud computing while getting clients to do the same. This will look like developing new services and offerings around, say, security and performance, and/or helping end users implement Cloud Centers of Excellence, Ganesan chimed in. Implementing Prosimo's multicloud networking "becomes a snowball effect," he said. "Now that my system is embedded here, what else can I talk about?"
Analysts: Prosimo's Multicloud Networking Lets Users Get More From Cloud
Partners, of course, will earn either commissions or margins, depending on how they interact with Prosimo, when signing up customers for the tiers beyond Multicloud Foundation. The greatest takeaway is that the company's new multicloud networking platform removes complex, cumbersome legacy approaches, said Bob Laliberte, principal analyst, networking at Enterprise Strategy Group.
"Prosimo MCN Foundation democratizes multicloud networking, accelerating the adoption and ability to scale connections to multiple public clouds, while also enabling enterprises to remain in full control of its infrastructure and focus on higher-value outcomes," Laliberte said.
For the 94% of enterprises with cloud-native workloads in multicloud environments, that's no small feat, added ESG's Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst, infrastructure modernization, application development and modernization.
"Solving cloud connectivity is a foundational requirement that makes cloud networking transparent and eliminates friction between cloud networking and DevOps, empowering them to work more collaboratively," Nashawaty said. "This enables enterprises to focus on the application and allows DevOps to accelerate cloud migration and deliver innovations aligned with business goals."
This story originally appeared on Channel Futures, an ITPro Today sister publication.
