I initially heard about this product at Discover in Las Vegas earlier this year. We had previously explored around cloud automation. The only product that I really looked at in terms of comparison was vRealize Automation, though the products are functionally very different. vRA has a fairly lengthy approval process baked in, which some people may find beneficial, but it is also on-premise deployment, heavily leveraging your VMware environment.

In comparison, HPE had a tool, CSA, which was sold off to Micro Focus, which has a fairly long install process. Also, VMware's vRealize Automation is a very big application just to set up to a point where you can do deployment. 

OneSphere being a SaaS platform, you do not have to deal with those issues. It is in quickly and you can begin utilizing it right away. It is a little more platform agnostic. You do not need VMware expertise on-premise, or the true technical expertise to deploy a product like vRA.

That was my true takeaway. When you compare it, it is simple to deploy, simple to utilize, and easy to consume resources.

We are always evaluating products in this space. One of my primary roles is cloud consulting, especially when it comes to automation and DevOps enablement. We were looking at a broad-range spectrum.

Obviously the big ones are vRealize Automation and vRealize Business, so the VMware products, as well as HPE's - now Micro Focus' - products, with Micro Focus Operations Orchestration and CSA.

With all the time and investment in all the competitive products, still it makes them not even a competitor anymore, with how this works. The fact that this was up and going in minutes, to a day, spoke volumes to the fact that I have worked with some of these other products for days, weeks, or months - even a couple off and on for years - and never got them to fully work properly. This worked right out-of-the-box, within the first day.