Rival cloud superpowers VMWare and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a highly-anticipated partnership on Friday, one they hope will be an easy sell and increase their competitive advantages by tenfold.
The alliance represents a massive conglomerate between two tech giants in one of the most significant trends in business.
Increasingly, more companies are moving their data to the online storage platforms so they can access it from anywhere and use it in multiple applications.
The pair will offer VMware Cloud on AWS, a software that leverages Amazon’s public cloud. It aims to help many firms that are already using VMWare in their business but are hoping to move their data to offsite clouds.
The VMWare and AWS will establish their dominance in both public and hybrid cloud environments
Amazon (AMZN) is dominant in the public cloud infrastructure market, but has limited support for “hybrid” cloud environments, while VMWare (VMW) virtualization software runs a large percentage of on-premise workloads but has limited public cloud presence.
On-prem software is installed and runs on computers in the building of the person or organization using the software, rather than at a remote center such as a server farm or cloud.
Basically, both companies target each other weaknesses. In fact, their agreement sees VMware Cloud on AWS, so business can run AWS server workloads on top of VMware’s software while also managing the data through their infrastructures.
Previously, the services of the two companies could not integrate effectively, so clients had to make a binary decision and then buy additional software and hardware to satisfy their needs.
The service will enable VMware’s vMotion feature to quickly move workloads between AWS and a company’s data centers.
The vSphere server virtualization software will support the company’s virtual storage, while the NSX networking will ensure the security of the platform.
The VMWare-AWS partnership is bad news for Microsoft
While Amazon has a 31 percent of the worldwide market share in the cloud and is the world’s first cloud service provider, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) holds the second spot.
Microsoft offers flexible combinations of software services and data storages and is slowly bolstering its cloud services.
The tech overlord is currently living a momentum of its cloud businesses including Office 365 platform, Skype, Evernote, One Cloud, Outlook and Hotmail, Windows Server, Azure, and more.
Microsoft’s cloud services made a revenue of $10 billion last year, and the company projects the earnings will grow to hit $20 billion by 2018.
Hybrid environments will be in 80 percent of IT organizations by 2018, according to IDC estimates.
Source: VMWare Blog