IBM Partners With VMware Inc.

The tech giant is leaving no stone unturned to get the company back on the road to growth

Big Blue has announced this Monday that it has signed partnership with VMware so that the workload can be conveniently launched in IBM SoftLayer cloud infrastructure by the  VSphere customers. Apart from IBM, many other companies, who have any kind of public cloud strategy, look forward to get around the existing VMware vSphere consumers.

The importance of VMW customers can be deduced from the fact that VSphere server are being used by nearly 80% of corporate customers in their data centers. Moreover, a large number of customers intend to integrate their applications and data into an enterprise-class cloud so that they can reap benefits of potential cost advantages and flexibility from the consumption of shared computing and storage.

The New York based organization, at IBM InterConnect, is likely to disclose how the workloads of VSphere can be managed in IBM’s public cloud in Las Vegas. The proposed project is quite in the line of VMware VCloud Air, which has been launched approximately three years ago.

Once declared as a potential rival to Amazon Web Services, the Silicon Valley business’ VCloud Air focus has been narrowed by VMware. This decision triggers IBM’s and other cloud players interest in the service. Few years ago, Amazon Web Services released a set of tools which let the administrators of VMware conveniently manage AWS and VMware workloads by working on the same screen. However, according to IBM’s chief technology officer, Jim Comfort, the company envisions taking the VSphere workloads to a new level and enabling the VSphere to be “pushbutton accessible on our cloud.”

Comfort further said: “We can do that globally. If you do that with a provider here and one in Singapore we have globally connected network in 49 data centers.”

Comfort further cited that it may seem that the $129 billion firm is planning to work on the plain VSphere however the company intends to do the same for VMware’s NSX network virtualization technology and for VSphere plus NSX plus vRealize management software.

Big Blue has been persisting strongly for the hybrid cloud message where, the company says, the consumers can choose to let some workloads run on IBM’s cloud while the rest being run in their own infrastructure. Consumers can also choose to handle the transition or let IBM do it.  

How far can IBM take this VMware’s partnership will be revealed in the future. Hopefully the quivering ship of the company be back on the track to success.