IBM Partners with VMware on Hybrid Cloud and Plans to Boost Cloud Credibility

In this latest round of announcements, a new partnership with virtualization giant VMware became the lead story.  The new VMware agreement will make it easier and faster for companies using VMware’s virtualization products to automatically extend their workloads to IBM’s Cloud data centers, so those companies can easily connect their own data centers to the cloud without having to rewrite or repackage those workloads — solving a key barrier to cloud migration.  The idea is to make IBM’s services more attractive to VMware’s customers.

IBM says that enterprises that use VMware technologies, which currently covers nearly 100% of the Fortune 100, will be able to run services across 45 IBM Cloud Data Centers globally in a seamless manner.  Services covered include pre-configured VMware SDDC environments, consisting of VMware vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN on the IBM Cloud. 

IBM and VMware added they would jointly market and sell the resulting hybrid cloud offering, allowing customers to house data on both existing on-premises physical data centers and the cloud at once.  That would include seamless workload migrations, disaster recovery, capacity expansion and data center consolidation.  This could be a major thumb in the eye for Amazon, a current leader in the cloud market, but a cloud king with a major deficiency when it comes to an enterprise hybrid cloud strategy.

"We are reaching a tipping point for cloud as the platform on which the vast majority of business will happen," said Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president, IBM Cloud.  "The strategic partnership between IBM and VMware will enable clients to easily embrace the cloud while preserving their existing investments and creating new business opportunities."

The hybrid cloud market is estimated to grow from $25.28 billion in 2014 to $84.67 billion in 2019, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 27.3% from 2014 to 2019 according to a new market research report from MarketsandMarkets.  IBM and VMware are looking to tap into this market, and the new partnership announcement solidifies the pair are betting on organizations ultimately making the move to the cloud.

Additional key benefits for customers when the new offerings are available will include:

• IBM and VMware will provide the expertise, solutions, and cloud infrastructure to help customers manage and scale their IT resources running in private and public clouds, utilizing the tools, processes and APIs with which customers are already familiar,
• Through sophisticated workload automation, clients will have the ability to quickly provision new or scale existing workloads to the IBM Cloud,
• Companies will have additional reach and scale to more easily start locally and scale globally with cloud capabilities, and also comply with data residency and other regulatory mandates,
• VMware customers will be able to use a flexible, monthly-based consumption pricing model that makes it more cost effective for users by enabling a simple pay-as-you-go option,
• The IBM Cloud will be a showcase platform in the VMware vCloud Air Network cloud provider ecosystem.

IBM is also making maneuvers to go after developers through partnership with GitHub and Apple.  IBM’s first of its kind agreement with GitHub will allow GitHub Enterprise, GitHub’s paid business product, to be delivered as-a-service over IBM’s Bluemix hosted cloud service.  IBM also plans to make things easier for developers using its tools to create applications in Apple’s recently open-sourced iOS native programming language, Swift, to create applications for the iPhone and other widely used Apple devices.  And by connecting its WebSphere middleware to its cloud services through a product called IBM Websphere Cloud Connect, IBM hopes the IBM Cloud would become more appealing to Java developers by making it easier to use APIs to connect one service to another and to more easily link up services in the cloud, whether on the cloud or not. 

In other cloud news, the Siemens Building Technologies Division and IBM announced cloud-based solutions that will leverage Siemens’ building expertise and IBM Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities to maximize the potential of connected buildings and the data they create, helping corporate real estate owners across multiple industries drive business results and meet energy efficiency goals.  And in the hope of getting some traction with other startup companies, IBM also announced that Bitly, the link management company, said that it would be migrating 25 billion links made by way of its link shortening service to IBM’s cloud. 

IBM made a few other announcements of its own, around Watson APIs being put into beta; and application development by way of a new platform, OpenWhisk, an event-driven platform that runs on Bluemix.  Taking another stab at Amazon, IBM plans to release OpenWhisk as an open-source project to entice developers looking for flexibility and to address concerns about cloud tool "vendor lock-in" — and in that way, they hope it will come across as a compelling alternative to Amazon Web Services’ popular Lambda tool and Google’s Cloud Functions.

Pricing details on the above news is currently unknown.  So stay tuned.