(Note: After an award-winning career in the media business covering the tech industry, Bob Evans was VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle from 2012 to 2016. He now runs his own firm, Evans Strategic Communications LLC.)
CLOUD WARS -- The great myth of cloud computing is that it would somehow magically make all the agony and cost of integration disappear, and that private clouds and public clouds would somehow interoperate easily and elegantly with each other and also with on-premises systems.
While that myth remains a total hallucination, the possibility of seamless private/public cloud integration—of highly dependable real-world collaboration between traditional data centers and the cloud—has become much more real with the decision by private-cloud leader VMware to forge powerful partnerships with public-cloud leaders Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google.
Here's a quick overview of the deals that VMware—#10 on my Cloud Wars Top 10 list—has struck with those four cloud heavyweights. I've also included some thoughts on why each of those partnerships will streamline and accelerate corporate customers' journeys to the cloud via the hybrid approach—some private, some public—that's the goal of just about every business on the planet.
- Amazon: VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly architected solution that allows customers to run VMware’s market-leading compute, storage and network virtualization solutions directly on AWS. With hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world already running big chunks of their operations on VMware's virtualized systems, this partnership allows them to leverage existing assets, skill sets and processes while also gaining the unique advantages of the cloud: lower operating costs, more flexibility, less infrastructure sprawl to manage. The partnership with AWS was announced about a year ago, and now the jointly developed underlying technology is available.
- Microsoft: Later this year, VMware's Desktop-as-a-Service will become available on the Microsoft Azure cloud, and is an outgrowth of VMware's focus on tying end-user computing into the underlying cloud architecture. In addition, some elements of VMware's broader Cloud Service will also eventually become available on Azure, including services for management, network security, and automation.
- IBM: A big portion of the IBM Cloud is built on VMware technology (via IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer), and this partnership extends the range of compatibility for customers across IBM Cloud and VMware's offerings.
- Google: A joint-development project across Google, VMware and Pivotal Software in the red-hot area for "container" services lets enterprises move workloads to the cloud while leveraging existing assets, which VMware says will help business customers accelerate innovation.
In the meantime, VMware's financial fortunes have been booming: for its quarter ended July 31, VMware posted revenue of $1.90 billion, up 12.2% for the year, leading CEO Pat Gelsinger to say in the earnings press release, “As we continue our multi-year journey from a compute virtualization company to offer a broad portfolio of products driving efficiency and digital transformation, customers are increasingly turning to VMware to help them run, manage, secure and connect their applications across all clouds and all devices.”
Investors are, without question, buying into VMware's strategy: a year ago, on Sept. 13, 2016, VMware's stock price was $73.67. Today, on Sept. 13, 2017, it's $109.60—up an whopping 49%.
VMware COO Sanjay Poonen shared some thoughts about these developments with me via email, emphasizing that every company in every industry will be using both private and public clouds, and that VMware could provide huge benefit to those businesses by helping them orchestrate that essential interplay.
And while Poonen made it clear that VMware's bullish about each of its four deals with major public-cloud providers, the centerpiece is the deal with Amazon.
"Customers across industries want the ability to seamlessly integrate their on-premise data-center environments with AWS, while still using their existing tools and skillsets within a common operating environment on familiar VMware software," he said.
"VMware Cloud on AWS delivers on this promise, with a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud that extends on premise vSphere environments to a VMware Software-Defined Datacenter running on AWS elastic, bare-metal infrastructure."
Emphasizing that both Amazon and VMware were keen to provide a solution that would allow businesses to preserve their significant—and sometimes huge—investments in VMware-based applications and processes, Poonen said the partnership doesn't force customers to choose between either the private-cloud path or the public-cloud path, but instead allows them to pursue both in line with the specific requirements of the business.
"Ultimately," he wrote, "it means that VMware customers can easily operate a consistent and seamless hybrid cloud without rewriting their applications or changing their operating model, while taking advantage of AWS’s global footprint and scale, as well as its services in storage, databases, analytics and more."
Calling the new VMware Cloud on AWS service "a data center in the cloud," Poonen said VMware "expects this AWS offering to be "the flagship offering in our Cloud portfolio."
After VMware's initial cloud foray a few years ago proved to be a total flop and a near-disaster for the company, this new customer-driven strategy has helped VMware carve out a unique position in the intensely crowded and competitive cloud marketplace.
"AWS, Azure, Google and IBM are the top four public-cloud players by market-share, and each of these key cloud players is now working with VMware in material but unique ways that are completely customer-centric," Poonen said.
And while VMware's public comments about the deals echoed Poonen's excitement at being deeply aligned with those four public-cloud leaders, he also made it clear that VMware's not just some shy violet that can't believe it got asked to the prom.
"Every industry is becoming increasingly technology-driven at its core, and our belief is software is changing the world," Poonen wrote in response to my question about the uniqueness of VMware's opportunity.
"And we believe we have the most innovative technology to revolutionize the data-center, modernize the digital workspace and build bridges into the world of hybrid cloud. No other company at our level of scale has the immense base of highly satisfied customers and market leadership in the private cloud, which now allows us a unique opportunity to be relevant and strategic to all the public-cloud vendors, starting with AWS.
"No other vendor has this level of strategic leverage in the data-center and hybrid cloud."
In the Cloud Wars, that's a very big claim to make—but it looks like that at least for now, VMware's claim is completely credible.
Kudos to VMware for charting a bold new path and for making business benefit to customers a top priority.
