The big news from this week’s VMworld Conference, the massive customer gathering from enterprise virtualization VMware, is the vendor’s partnerships with cloud leaders Amazon.com and Google, as well as a closer relationship with Pivotal, a sister company under the massive Dell Technologies umbrella.
The Amazon deal is relatively straightforward. VMware VMs can now run on the Amazon AWS cloud, giving VMware customers (who include most large and mid-size enterprises) the ability to move workloads from VMware to AWS seamlessly.
This deal is a solid win for VMware and its customers, as it gives the vendor a well-articulated public cloud strategy, and it gives customers the ability to implement a broader range of combination on-premises plus public cloud scenarios, what we like to call Hybrid IT.
The biggest winner in the deal, however, is likely to be Amazon. Not only will the arrangement add directly to its not-insignificant bottom line, but Amazon will now be able to pick off VMware customers at its leisure.
In other words, while the VMware/Amazon deal may appear to reduce cloud ‘stickiness,’ or cloud provider lock-in, in reality AWS is as sticky as ever. Note in particular that the workload portability goes only one way. Once a customer checks into AWS, they don’t check out.
Lock-in issues aside, however, the main reason neither company thought to implement the ability to move native AWS workloads to VMware is likely because customers aren’t asking for this capability in sufficient numbers – and for those enterprises that would like AWS API compatibility in private cloud or on-premises environments, there are smaller vendors that are able to meet such a requirement.
It seems, therefore, that VMware penned this partnership deal, not because it wanted to, but because it had to. It needed a solid public cloud strategy to give its customers better Hybrid IT options, especially in the face of Microsoft’s move to build an on-premises Azure offering – what Microsoft cognoscenti are snidely referring to as its ‘VMware killer.’
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/08/31/hybrid-it-landscape-crystallizes-with-vmware-partnerships/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Microsoft and VMware are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
