VMware Offloads vCloud Air Business To French Hosting Provider OVH

VMware is selling its vCloud Air business to French cloud hosting provider OVH for an undisclosed sum, with the deal expected to close in the second quarter of 2017.

vCloud Air is VMware’s core infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering, based on the software-driven data centre and designed to meet enterprise needs by providing a secure hybrid cloud environment.

Once the deal is complete, all vCloud Air US and European data centres, customer operations and customer success teams will be handed over to OVH, which will continue to operate the service under the banner ‘vCloud Air Powered by OVH’.

Au revoir

The French firm will also “closely partner” with VMware on go-to-market and customer support around data centre expansion, consolidation and recovery, building on the partnership that brought Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) as-a-Service to market in 2016.

“We are pleased to announce this next step in vCloud Air’s evolution,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. “We have enjoyed a long and successful partnership with OVH and view this acquisition as an extension of our partnership and a positive for our customers and partners. Customers will have access to OVH’s global footprint, high-touch customer support, and still retain the VMware SDDC technology innovation that they are accustomed to.

“We remain committed to delivering our broader cross-cloud architecture that extends our hybrid cloud strategy, enabling customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment.”

Octave Klaba, chairman and CEO of Dell-owned OVH added that the acquisition will give the company “a very unique value proposition for larger enterprise deployments, including rich capabilities for migration and advanced hybrid functionalities for virtual data centres”.

VMware has been busy building out its hybrid cloud strategy over the last few months, touting the importance of freedom and control and trying to position itself as the glue that holds businesses together on their digital transformation journeys.

At VMWorld 2016 in Barcelona, this “cross-cloud” strategy was strengthened with the introduction of vSphere 6.5, which offers customers a universal application platform.

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