VMware Cloud on AWS is the new cloud partnership that everyone is talking about. However, there's a bigger question: What bets should enterprises place on this collaboration?
The deal certainly has gotten a lot of hype. That's because it puts together the single biggest name in the public cloud space with the most recognizable name in virtualization. The idea is that you'll have an on-ramp to the cloud that enterprises will have a hard time refusing.
VMware has been struggling with the new cloud movement, and this deal gives it a path to incorporate its traditional technology with a cool, trendy breakthrough: the Amazon Web Services platform.
Most of the enterprises that I work with these days have two characteristics in common: First, they use virtualization in their datacenters, typically 60 to 80 percent. Second, they have moved or want to move some workloads to AWS. The notion that they can run some of VMware's software in the AWS cloud is compelling, considering the investment that most enterprises have already made in VMware.
Of course, many enterprises already run VMware on premises and use AWS in a hybrid cloud architecture. But it was much harder to get there without a formal partnership between VMware and AWS. Those enterprises had to figure out, largely on their own, a creative architecture to match workloads that run in a virtualized datacenter with workloads that run on AWS.
I'm sure that both AWS and VMware saw this happening and decided they need to marry for the sake of the kids -- I mean, their enterprise customers.
Like parents, VMware and AWS will have to figure out the relationship, and that will take time. Thus, why we won't see the real benefits of the partnership for a good year. Keep that in mind when you do your own planning.