The SaaS option will strengthen go-to-market options for Virtustream and their strategic partners and channels. Virtustream also recently made an executive alignment to give a higher priority to the indirect channel.

Virtustream, Dell Technologies’ enterprise cloud company, has launched a new version of their Virtustream Viewtrust risk management and continuous compliance monitoring solution that extends it from a pure software play to one that can be consumed as a SaaS offering or a managed service. That will extend the use cases where it can be sold.

“Viewtrust is a client monitoring tool for security event management,” said Rob Bissett, Virtustream’s Director of Strategic Marketing. “It is something we acquired a number of years back – before Virtustream was acquired by EMC – and which we maintained as a separate product. We sell Viewtrust to customers with very complex compliance requirements. It simplifies event management, compliance reporting and the audit process. The customer is able to bring all the events into a single dashboard, and overlay the compliance framework on top. This makes audit compliance dramatically simple.” Viewtrust supports a broad range of compliance requirements, including FISMA, SOX, PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, and now GDPR, as well as custom user-defined compliance frameworks.

“We have integrations into U.S. defense security agencies, which simplifies the federal agency compliance process,” Bissett said. “It eliminates the paperwork of proving compliance by automating it. This is something that used to be overwhelming before.”

Until now, Viewtrust has always been an on-prem product.

“It is very big and complex, and typically deployed in environments with tens of thousands of customers,” Bissett said.

The breakthrough with this next-generation version of the product is that it can now be consumed in a SaaS model.

“This new version is still software, but because it is significantly lighter than before, we are now able to offer it as a SaaS offering,” Bissett said. It can now be purchased as an on-prem software deployment, as self-service SaaS or on a managed service model.

The SaaS capabilities do not significantly change the market for Viewtrust. It is still a product for complex compliance requirements of larger enterprises and government agencies. They do, however, expand the potential use cases in which Viewtrust can be deployed.

“The enterprise transformation process is not a single act,” Bissett said. “This will allow us to address more dynamic transformation processes. Rather than simply offer discrete solutions, we can offer a more comprehensive one where the offering is aligned to specific use cases. It now has out-of-the-box connections to third party clouds as well.”

The enhancements in this version of Viewtrust will make it easier to align with the broader Dell Technologies go-to-market motion.

“There is no question that the Dell relationship has been a positive for us,” Bissett said. “We are extremely close to the mother ship. We operate under our own brand, but we have access to the resources of the world’s largest technology company. This includes engineering alignments. We can sit down with their hardware designers and recommend changes that will benefit us. Their brand reach is also enormous for us, and Dell EMC, Pivotal and VMware are all important sales channels for us.”

Going forward, Bissett said that the channels of these companies will all be able to make greater use of Virtustream as well. When EMC acquired Virtustream, it was entirely a direct play, and its business is still largely direct, although within the last year and a half, Dell EMC partners received program benefits for selling both Virtustream Enterprise Cloud and Virtustream Storage Cloud. The plan is to broaden this out more this year, however.

“Today, we interact with indirect partners on a regular basis, particularly with system integrators, as well as those other Dell companies as channels,” Bissett said. “However, building the indirect business will be a growth lever this year. We recently moved Christina Colby to the channel chief role. Previous to that, she ran our Diamond Account business – our biggest customers. Bringing someone like her into the channel role, as SVP of Strategic Alliances, reflects the value we are now attaching to building out indirect markets.”