IBM has signed a strategic partnership to move VMware customers onto the IBM Cloud, in a bold bid to claw market share from industry titans Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Instigating Cloud warfare at its annual IBM InterConnect Conference in Las Vegas, the tech giant hopes the deal will boost the company’s cloud credentials in a market dominated by AWS, and backed up by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Terms of the deal will enable enterprise customers to extend existing workloads from on-premises software-defined datacentre to the Cloud.
With nearly 100 percent of Fortune 100 customers utilising VMware technologies, both parties claim the partnership will “help preserve and extend” customer investments across thousands of data centres.
As such, customers will be able to leverage VMware’s technologies with IBM’s growing footprint of 45 cloud data centres worldwide.
“This partnership, an extension of our 14-year plus relationship with IBM, demonstrates a shared vision that will help enterprise customers more quickly and easily embrace the hybrid cloud,” says Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware.
“Our customers will be able to efficiently and securely deploy their proven software-defined solutions with sophisticated workload automation to take advantage of the flexibility and cost effectiveness of IBM Cloud.”
Gelsinger says IBM and VMware have jointly designed an architecture and cloud offering that will enable customers to automatically provision pre-configured VMware Software Defined Data Centre environments, consisting of VMware vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN on the IBM Cloud.
With this SDDC environment in place, customers will be able to deploy workloads in this hybrid cloud environment without modification, due to common security and networking models based on VMware.
“We are reaching a tipping point for cloud as the platform on which the vast majority of business will happen,” adds Robert LeBlanc, Senior vice president, IBM Cloud.
“The strategic partnership between IBM and VMware will enable clients to easily embrace the cloud while preserving their existing investments and creating new business opportunities.”
In addition, LeBlanc says IBM will utilise its CloudBuilder tools and workload automation capabilities to automatically provision pre-configured or custom workloads to the cloud, validated by VMware's design patterns for SDDC architectures.
Going forward, the two companies will also jointly market and sell new offerings for hybrid cloud deployments, including workload migrations, disaster recovery, capacity expansion and data centre consolidation.