Public cloud provider Virtustream has launched a healthcare cloud service and officially joined parent company Dell EMC’s global partner program, executives announced Wednesday at Dell EMC World 2017 in Las Vegas.
The news comes about eight months after Dell acquired Virtustream as part of the EMC buyout. Virtustream was already working with a range of partners, but Channel Chief Scott Millard told ChannelE2E shortly after the deal closed to expect a more formalized partner program in 2017.
Dell EMC partners now have the opportunity to become Virtustream partners, selling Virtustream Enterprise Cloud and Virtustream Storage Cloud, although the latter has been available to existing Dell EMC partners since December to keep up with demand for enterprise storage.
In other Virtustream news, the company has launched a new cloud-based electronic medical records (EMR) service. Virtustream Healthcare Cloud will support a range of healthcare providers, including Epic Systems - one of the largest healthcare software firms in the world that supports medical records for 54 percent of U.S. patients.
Virtustream Market
Virtustream is a combination MSP-CSP with roughly 20 data centers worldwide. The company specializes in running mission-critical SaaS applications like SAP. A microservices architecture allows the CSP to carefully manage customer workloads and associated billing details.
At first glance, Virtustream competes against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. However, the company tries to specialize rather than being a general purpose cloud.
An early SAP leader which downplays the AWS rivalry, Virtustream focuses mainly on enterprise and midmarket applications, while AWS attracts a lot of startups and small businesses moving to the cloud, ChannelE2E believes.
Virtustream for Partners
Following the Dell-EMC merger, the IT giant launched a unified partner program in February. Adding Virtustream to that program simplifies the process for partners and offers existing Dell EMC resellers access to Virtustream’s range of cloud products, Millard said in a statement.
In addition to Enterprise Cloud and Storage Cloud, Virtustream offers Federal Cloud and Managed Services products.
Healthcare Cloud
Virtustream Healthcare Cloud is designed specifically for highly secure, highly compliant and complex IT landscapes, the company said. It offers consumption-based pricing, and it can be deployed in public, private and hybrid cloud environments.
The service will provide cloud-based hosting of healthcare platforms and applications on Virtustream Enterprise Cloud in a HIPAA/HITECH complaint environment with managed services and availability service level agreements (SLAs) of up to 99.999 percent, according to Virtustream.
“With our latest offering, Virtustream introduces an enterprise-class solution to manage healthcare’s most complex and mission-critical applications, thus freeing healthcare providers not only to embrace the digital future, but also to focus on their core mission of saving patient lives,” Vice President Michael Hoch said in a statement.
