As government agencies modernize legacy IT and migrate more applications and infrastructure to the cloud, the way they manage those services must also evolve.
But this evolution isn’t necessarily easy. One challenge in particular that agencies face is the complexity that comes with buying and managing a variety of cloud products and services across multiple vendors. Even managing a single vendor with a vast portfolio can be difficult. Agencies need the flexibility to look across their IT portfolio, easily track cloud services, requirements pricing, performance, usage and key performance indicators (KPIs).
These growing needs were the driving force behind ViON’s recent rollout of its latest offering — the ViON MarketPlace. In a nutshell, this secure cloud services platform simplifies the management of private, public and hybrid cloud environments. The ViON MarketPlace lets agencies research technology, compare features, request quotes and manage services from anywhere, anytime. It allows organizations to easily scale and manage governance with performance service level agreements (SLAs) to meet mission success.
“The Marketplace allows government agencies to focus on their mission, while we focus on their datacenter performance and how the technology is managed and refreshed,” said ViON President Jeff Henry. “It’s a new acquisition model that will help accelerate IT modernization.” ViON is a cloud service provider with over 37 years’ experience designing and delivering enterprise data center solutions to government agencies and commercial businesses.
Among the features that agencies can expect when using the platform is the ability to easily compare technologies and pricing across more than two dozen original equipment manufacturers (OEM) that partner with ViON. As a result, the platform provides one of the largest portfolios of technology available as-a-Service.
“We have over 25 OEMs that we put into the ViON MarketPlace, but that’s not a fixed number,” Henry said. “If there are other opportunities to bring additional disruptive technologies, or meet new market needs, we can add technology from current or new vendors. Making it easier for our customers to get access to innovative technologies is at the heart of what we do.”
Henry likened the ease of use to the same experience people have when managing popular public cloud platforms. In terms of the ViON MarketPlace, “We see it as our industry’s easy button,” he said. Having seamless visibility of cloud investments frees agencies up to look at disruptive and cutting-edge technologies coming out of places like Silicon Valley.
The target users of the ViON MarketPlace are chief information officers and IT professionals who manage large infrastructures in the public and commercial sectors. “It’s an easy tool for anybody who’s involved in making buying decisions and developing the strategy around what technologies will be used in a data center environment today and assessing future needs,” Henry said.
Customers need to realize they have more than just two choices: business as usual or public cloud. ViON helps customers look at how to innovate with a cloud-like experience using the ViON MarketPlace and consumption-based models. This is an operational model that can adjust to increases or decreases in capacity. Once agencies become customers, there are opportunities for them to tailor the portal to meet their specific needs.
“You can look at the information on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, and it uses an ITIL- based governance for service delivery,” Henry said.
ViON’s platform readily adapts to multiple step government requirement and ordering approval workflows,” Henry said. “The whole idea behind our MarketPlace is that it’s easy to use, and it’s easy to manage.”
Learn more about ViON’s Marketplace here.
