VMware Confirms Hybrid Cloud Arrival Later This Year

VMware executives finally confirmed the arrival of its hybrid cloud service offering.

According to the company, this new product will allow its 480,000 customers to benefit from the public cloud without the need to change their existing applications, while using a common management, orchestration, networking and security model.

Channel Route

The launch of the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service has been slated for later this year and the company intends to offer it via its existing channel, and utilise its “extensive partner ecosystem to accelerate customers’ journey to the cloud.”

The channel element is important to note here, as it seems that rather than adopting the Amazon AWS approach of building its own bespoke data centres for this cloud service, VMware will make use of the existing facilities from its partners and service providers. It currently has more than 200 service providers offering vCloud-based services in 31 countries.

After teasing about the arrival of its hybrid cloud service, the company revealed the creation of a new business unit. The Hybrid Cloud Services unit will be led by former Savvis President Bill Fathers, who is now senior vice president and general manager of the VMware unit.

“Bill understands how to drive adoption of enterprise cloud services and has a clear vision to build and strengthen our newly formed Hybrid Cloud Services business unit,” explained Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, during an investor event. “With his expertise and proven ecosystem mindset, VMware and its partners will deliver the richest set of complementary cloud offerings and empower our customers to achieve maximum value from their hybrid cloud investments.”

“Enterprise adoption of cloud services is ramping exponentially, and VMware is uniquely positioned to deliver on the promise of hybrid cloud,” stated Fathers.

“I look forward to leading the new hybrid Hybrid Cloud Services business unit and partnering with our ecosystem to provide customers the ultimate flexibility in how they deploy existing and new applications – on premise, off-premise, or through whatever combination works best for their business needs.”

Expected Move

Rumours of the launch of a public cloud launch have been surfacing for a while now. Last week, the rumpur mill kicked into overdrive after a mysterious Twitter message from VMware, that was quickly deleted.

The Twitter message stated: “VMware is prepping a vCloud-based public cloud service!”

The message included a link to a report suggesting that VMware had begun inviting customers to take part in a private beta-test of the public cloud service. It was posted to more than 31,000 followers of VMware’s vCloud Twitter account.

As mentioned above, reports have circulated for some time now that VMware is developing its own enterprise-grade Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering to compete with the likes of Amazon EC2.

Indeed, VMware has been building up its vCloud product line for the past two years, most recently via acquisitions, and in February of this year the company launched its vCloud Integration Manager to help cloud service providers automate the delivery and operations of VMware vCloud Director-based clouds.

Another big clue was dropped last August when VMware launched a trial cloud service, called vCloud Service Evaluation, which allowed potential customers to try out vCloud-based services on VMware’s own infrastructure.

And at its Partner Exchange conference last month VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger made it clear the company was targeting the public cloud in general and Amazon in particular. If the corporate workload goes to Amazon, “you lose, and we have lost forever,” he reportedly said.

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