To go along with the general theme of VMworld 2012 for VCE, today it was announced that Cloupia has formally joined the VCE Technology Alliance Partner program, and that they will offer their end-to-end converged infrastructure management and orchestration solution to offer cloud services on VCE Vblock Systems.

There are a couple reasons this is an important announcement, and one that we’ve been working on behind the scenes diligently for some time.  First and foremost, the Cloupia Converged Infrastructure & Unified Orchestration product is a fantastic offering.  It’s easy to deploy, it works, it’s powerful and flexible and the team at Cloupia has been a joy to meet and work with.  The speed at which they can support new product and roll in requested functionality is pretty impressive for a product that is as mature as theirs is.  VCE customers have been asking for the ability to use it, and almost as importantly, our Cisco brothers and sisters on the sales side have been asking for us to be able to include it with Vblock System purchases.  Game on.

Secondly, as a product that used to be limited exclusively to a PDF-based reference architecture offered by a storage company, the Cloupia product had done an impressive job of propping up an otherwise non-existent management and orchestration story.  For customers that were resigned to going with a less desirable route to market because of their excitement about the tooling that Cloupia was offering, they now have the option of going with the VSPEX platform and having true choice in the components they use to deliver cloud services, including the market leading unified storage platform in the EMC VNX line, or choosing the only fully integrated, tested and support productized converged infrastructure on the market in the VCE Vblock Systems.  That sound you heard was someone having their crutch kicked out from under them.

Finally, we have long committed to customers that we are focusing on providing choice and flexibility in orchestration platform while working diligently to provide abstracted interfaces and unifying technologies to enable all of our ITSM and orchestration partners to provide value.  More importantly, we want our VCE partners to have a level playing field to innovate from, and not force them to continue to leverage the individual element managers going forward.  There’s a better way to enable programmatic consumption of converged infrastructure, and we are all very excited to have Cloupia onboard to help show that to customers.

If you have more questions about Cloupia, you can see their website here, or contact me through the comments below or on Twitter (@jdooley_clt).