Mumbai:In a move that aims to surge in the cloud competition, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a strategic partnership to offer new hybrid cloud services.Though both the vendors have not yet revealed the channel play post the collaboration, the industry experts say that the deal will enable manage service providers and other third-party IT solution providers to cross-sell and leverage the products of both companies.
VMware said that MSPs can take advantage of reduction in cost of managing their cloud or offer more service portfolio to generate more revenue. “There’s two ways we can help service providers and MSPs. We either help reduce their costs of managing their own cloud or we give the ability to add new services to drive new revenue streams”, MSPmentor quoted Geoffrey Waters, VMware’s vice president of service provider channel as saying.
Waters said that wide adoption of VMware solutions has translated into strong momentum for the channel ecosystem, where about 4,200 partners in 119 countries are serving about 99 percent of the cloud total addressable market. “That means our network of partners across the globe are able to offer end users choice and flexibility on a local basis, so you can get your cloud on a local basis”, he added.
VMware already has partnerships with public cloud providers. The company early this year unveiled a strategic partnership that lets customers migrate workloads back and forth between VMware-based private clouds and the IBM SoftLayer public cloud.
Under the new alliance announced on Thursday, VMware’s complete software-defined data center offering will run on the AWS public cloud. Called VMware Cloud on AWS, the service runs VMware’s enterprise class software-defined data center (SDDC) on the AWS cloud, allowing customers to run any application across public, private or hybrid cloud environments.
With this new deal, AWS will become VMware’s primary public cloud infrastructure partner, and VMware will be AWS’s primary private cloud partner. VMware’s vSphere, VSAN and NSX will run on the AWS cloud, and the service will be optimized to run on dedicated, bare metal AWS infrastructure built specifically for the service. Customers will have the ability to purchase services through their existing VMware commercial agreement and use their existing VMware software investments to secure additional loyalty discounts for their VMware Cloud on AWS hybrid environment.
Industry experts say the move helps AWS to better compete with rival Microsoft Corp. in hybrid cloud solutions. VMware Cloud on AWS is slated to be available in mid-2017. It will be delivered, sold, and supported by VMware. The company has not revealed prices of the offerings.