I was recently attending a cloud conference and had the chance to talk to several of the key technology vendors that were in attendance. One of the major vendors seems to be working closely with just about everyone in the cloud and virtualization space, and it made me question what kind of benefits to solution providers and other vendors these types of relationships provide. Suddenly the main cloud players are building partnerships to develop solutions for attached security, storage, asset management, performance monitoring and other operational technologies within virtual environments. But what benefit is there to have such tight integration with one or two key cloud platform vendors?

Vendor collaboration in the cloud space has seen a better focus on developing solutions that address the inherent risks associated with virtual and cloud environments. Platform vendors understand that these environments introduce a new area of risk and are working closely with industry leaders to address them at all layers of the cloud stack. This also aids channel vendors and service providers in reducing the obstacles that affect client adoption.

Association with partner vendors has always been a wise move for vendors as customers will naturally choose solutions that are certified to work together. Nothing is more frustrating for organizations than purchasing a bunch of different technologies and learning that they are incompatible or one of the manufacturers is no longer supporting another vendor’s component.

The other great benefit to this type of model is that the solutions, especially security ones, can be designed from a platform level which means they have access to the code that builds the environment. This means more robust security and more visibility into the virtual environments. In security, this is a key issue since a lot of traditional security solutions were not designed for virtual environments and cannot control the unique elements that reside within.

The security risks that exist with cloud and virtualization has been used as a way to explain the barrier to adoption. Many organizations cite this reason for why they are waiting to make the transition. By integrating market leading technologies from other vendors into the platforms themselves, these types of arguments are being rendered obsolete as the old mainframe platforms of the past.