IBM and VMware have strengthened their alliance to accelerate enterprise hybrid cloud adoption. As per the terms of the deal, IBM will provide new offerings to help extend critical workloads to their cloud platform and new integrations to help enterprises modernize applications with Kubernetes and containers.
Research firm Ovum claims that while 20 percent of business processes have already moved to the cloud, 80 percent of mission-critical workloads and sensitive data are still running on-premises because of performance and regulatory requirements. They believe that to make this possible, businesses need an open and hybrid cloud approach to developing, running and deploying applications in a multi-cloud environment.
By providing fully automated and managed global cloud architecture for mission-critical VMware workloads, IBM say that they will help enterprises prevent downtime for cloud applications and automate failovers within IBM cloud regions. They also say that this architecture will be managed by IBM and can be deployed across IBM Cloud’s 18 availability zones in the U.S., Europe and APAC regions.
Martin Jetter, Senior Vice President, Global Technology Services, IBM, commented:
With these new services and solutions, enterprises can migrate and modernize their most important VMware workloads on the IBM Cloud in a highly secure, open, multi-cloud environment. Our goal is to help clients reduce risk and prevent any disruptions in a cloud environment so they can remain laser-focused on innovation.
VMware claim that they will be using IBM’s Watson to help improve customer service across VMware support portals. They say that their customers can leverage Watson to quickly and easily communicate with the portal in the language of their choice.
Pat Gelsinger, CEO at VMware, commented:
The VMware and IBM partnership builds upon the strengths of both companies. VMware is relied upon by virtually every large enterprise today, including 100 percent of the Fortune 100.
Today these organizations can easily and securely extend these workloads into IBM’s global public cloud using Hybrid Cloud Extension for large-scale bulk migration and bi-directional application mobility.
It seems like IBM are consolidating their cloud prowess, following the USD 34 billion acquisition of Red Hat that was sealed last week.