Cloudian today announced a new partnership with VMware that will facilitate a native S3-compatible object storage service for more than 4,000 VMware cloud providers. Cloudian began offering a managed service provider program in April, and is now targeting VMware shops that want to offer customers S3-based services for storage, backup, archiving, disaster recovery, big data, containers, and software development.

Cloudian Object Storage can be managed directly from VMware’s vCloud Director and the company says the pairing will give VMware cloud providers the ability to deploy services in an agile environment. Cloudian also provides multi-tenant resource pooling, integrated management tools for billing and quality of service, data encryption, security, compliance, and geographic distribution for enterprises that need to manage storage across multiple data centers.

"Storage-as-a-service and backup-as-a-service have had the most traction to date, but we see significant opportunity in other use cases as enterprises look for cloud providers that can offer a broader range of services, including those related to big data and video surveillance," Jon Toor, chief marketing officer at Cloudian, wrote in response to questions.

Cloudian Object Storage for vCloud Director, which the companies describe as a jointly-engineered service, can be deployed by VMware cloud providers as a storage appliance or as software-defined storage. And because vCloud Director manages the storage it also provides native automation of workflows, according to the company. VMware cloud providers can also now buy Cloudian object storage software on a subscription basis. 

"These applications/use cases center on helping enterprises collect, manage, access, and leverage large datasets in public and private cloud environments. While VMware cloud providers might have been able to offer these services previously, they could not do so within the vCloud Director environment," Toor explained.

"By integrating Cloudian object storage in vCloud Director, we are enabling these providers to automate the delivering of multiple applications and have them all managed through a single [user interface]," he added. "This greatly simplifies workflows for both the providers and their enterprise customers."

Gartner expects the global public cloud services market to grow 17.5% in 2019 to $214.3 billion. Within the public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market, IDC expects cloud storage services revenues to reach $20 billion in 2019, and surpass $44 billion during the next three years.

“Cloudian Object Storage for vCloud Director will further enable our partners to capture the opportunity for managed services and extend their relationship with their enterprise customers beyond providing only basic cloud infrastructure-as-a-service,” said Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president of product management in VMware’s cloud provider business unit, in a prepared statement.

Cloudian CEO Michael Tso said the companies are working to meet the evolving needs of service providers and enterprises by reinforcing S3 as the “de facto standard of public and private cloud storage.” In a prepared statement, he added: “With VMware-powered clouds serving nearly 150,000 enterprise customers through its network of more than 4,000 cloud providers, VMware cloud infrastructure is driving the fourth ‘megacloud.’”

Cloudian has raised $173 million through a handful of funding rounds, including a $94 million Series E funding round in August 2018. The company has more than 300 customers and identifies roughly one-third of them as service providers. Cloudian claims to be the "mostly widely deployed independent provider of S3-compatible storage systems" and by making its platform available to VMware's cloud provider network, Toor says it is now tapped into "the largest cloud ecosystem."