In addition to spending billions of dollars buying companies in the lead up to VMworld next week, VMware also updated its Cloud Provider Platform and said the program now includes 4,300 cloud providers in more than 120 countries. This spans hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud — as well as regional providers.

More than 10 million virtual machines (VMs) run on VMware Cloud Provider clouds, said Rajeev Bhardwaj, VP of products for VMware’s Cloud Provider Software Business Unit.

The goal of the partner program, he added, is to make it easy for cloud providers to provide their customers with a consistent software-defined data center (SDDC) across hybrid cloud environments and also offer new, differentiated cloud services on top of the platform to drive revenue growth.

“What we mean by consistent infrastructure: VMware software-defined data center could run anywhere — in a customer’s data center, a cloud provider’s data center, or a public cloud data center — and the customer gets a consistent experience,” Bhardwaj said. “It’s consistent in terms of experience, security, cost, regardless of where the workloads run.”

To this end VMware updated vCloud Director, its cloud service delivery platform, adding more automation capabilities and a new unified view of hosted private and multi-tenant clouds. The latest release also includes intelligent workload placement and networking updates for VMware NSX-T, which are built into vCloud Director 10.

The platform also added an integration with VMware’s container orchestrator, Enterprise PKS, which means cloud providers can offer containers-as-a-service. And at VMworld the vendor will showcase a technology preview of vCloud Director integration with Bitnami Community.

VMware bought Bitnami in May. It provides application packaging targeted at container and Kubernetes environments. The Bitnami Community houses one of the largest catalogs of click-to-deploy applications and development stacks. Combining this with and Enterprise PKS will allow VMware Cloud Providers to “provide a cloud that’s developer ready, and offer both VM-based workloads and container-based workloads from the same platform,” Bhardwaj said.

And finally, to help cloud providers deliver monetizable services, VMware added a new program called VMware Cloud Provider Ready for DRaaS. The program has eight cloud providers now live and in production offering disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) on their VMware-powered clouds.

It also added an object storage extension so cloud providers’ customers can use S3-compliant object storage that is integrated into vCloud Director.

And a new certification is now available as part of the VMware Ready program so popular backup vendors can be certified to operate in a multi-tenant environment based on vCloud Director. Five vendors have completed the certification: Cohesity, CommVault, Dell EMC, Rubrik and Veeam.