I am excited to announce the general availability of Managed Applications in the Azure Marketplace. Managed Applications, an Azure unique offering, enables you to deploy entire applications and empower your partner to fully manage and maintain the application in your environment. This means, a partner like Xcalar, can deliver more than just deployment on a set of VMs. Xcalar can now deliver both the application and a fully operated solution, offering “Ap/Ops.” Partners like Xcalar will also maintain and service the application solution directly in your Azure environment.
This new distribution channel for our partners will change customer expectations in the public cloud. Unlike our competitors, in Azure, a marketplace application can now be much more than just deployment and set-up. Now it can be a fully supported and managed solution. This is a first in the public cloud!
You and your partners have been the inspiration for Azure Managed Applications. We hear from many of our customers looking to transform IT operations, that they need the simplicity of fully managed applications without all the infrastructure hubbub. Furthermore, our partners are seeking opportunities to offer their customers more value by adding service operations to their portfolio. With Managed Applications, you and your partners can achieve these goals. Here are a few of the details of the offering:
- Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and System Integrators (SIs) can build turnkey cloud solutions using Azure Resource Manager templates. Both the application IP and the underlying pre-configured Azure infrastructure can easily be packaged into a sealed and serviceable solution. This enables “Ap/Ops,” offering both the application and operations together in one package.
- Customers can deploy these turnkey solutions in their own Azure subscription as a sealed service, which is fully operated and maintained by the partner across the solution lifecycle. In addition, only the minimal level of access is granted, specifically for the sealed solution and its lifecycle operations.
- The result is a higher quality of service for our customers, fully managed by our partners. Thanks to the sealed and immutable nature of Managed Applications, nothing changes in the application or the infrastructure configuration, unless it is an explicit lifecycle operation by the trusted partner.
Whether these solutions are complex applications that are custom-built and maintained by MSPs or packaged applications delivered and serviced by ISVs, you can focus on what you need to do to accelerate your business transformation without having to worry so much about running someone else’s software. Managed Applications accelerate innovation, even in the most advanced application scenarios, bringing the best of software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service together.
At Ignite we enabled our partners to deploy and service Managed Applications inside customer owned enterprise service catalogs. With today’s addition of Azure Marketplace as a distribution channel, partners can add value to their marketplace offering by adding lifecycle and support services with an incremental flat monthly fee. Our launch partners are excited and ready to go…
“Azure Managed Applications enables OpsLogix customers to easily deploy and use our solutions without having to undertake on-going maintenance and servicing complexities.”
Vincent de Vries, CEO, OpsLogix
“Azure Managed Applications allows Xcalar Data Platform to provide a higher quality of service and help forge stronger partnerships with our customers. Enterprise applications, Azure cloud infrastructure, and production operations can now be packaged into a single solution.”
Vikram Joshi Co-founder and CEO, Xcalar“We’re delighted to be bringing the power and simplicity of Cisco Meraki cloud networking to customers using Microsoft Azure. Our two companies both share a passion for better IT, and by leveraging our powerful Auto VPN and SD-WAN features we can seamlessly connect users to the resources they depend on every day.”
Raviv Levi, Senior Product Line Manager, Cisco Meraki
Go ahead, give it a try. We would love to hear from you about your experience with Azure Managed Applications and our partner solutions. Leave us feedback at the user voice channel or the comments section below.
More innovation for our partners is on the horizon, so stay tuned! And, do not forget to check Gaurav’s blog for a closer look under the hood on how this works.
See ya around,
Corey Sanders
