VMware Expands To Asia With Japan, China Partnerships

VMware intends to become the latest Western tech company to  break into the potentially lucrative Chinese market, announcing a cloud computing partnership with China Telecom.

VMware will work with China Telecom’s cloud computing branch, to build a hybrid cloud service for Chinese customers, from 2015, according to a blog posting by Sanjay Mirchandani, VMware’s senior VP for Asia Pacific and Japan.

Clouds over China

Foreigners are not allowed to own data centres in China, so CEO Pat Gelsinger went to China to announce the  two companies will partner on a hybrid cloud service data centre in Beijing. VMware already owns data centres in the United States, and the UK.

VMware intends to initially offer Chinese customers an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) option, but could expand this in the future to include disaster recovery-as-a-service and desktop-as-a-service.

“VMware has been pursuing a strategy of partnering with key Chinese technology, distribution and service provider partners to produce Chinese solutions for Chinese organisations,” wrote Mirchandani. “In that regard, China Telecom is the nation’s biggest cloud service provider. It operates an extensive telecommunications network and serves the largest Internet user base in China.”

“When the new hybrid cloud service is up and running, China Telecom’s sales force will target large to medium-sized enterprises and government departments,” he wrote. “These will typically involve the financial, energy, transportation, insurance, healthcare and education sectors.”

VMware’s ambitions in China are admirable, but western companies are finding it increasingly difficult to do business in that country with Chinese authorities pressuring businesses to replace Western equipment with local offerings.

And China also said recently that it would vet Western technology companies operating in the country. The China Central Government Procurement Centre has also excluded Windows 8 from government purchases, and access to online companies such as Google, remains blocked altogether.

Japanese Partner

VMware also revealed this week that is expanding its VMware vCloud Hybrid Service into Japan, in partnership with SoftBank.

According to the company, Japan will be the first Asian market and third in the world to deploy this Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) public cloud solution.

“VMware vCloud Hybrid Service is growing quickly in the US and UK, and the capability we are talking about today addresses Japan’s data locality, privacy, security and sovereignty challenges,” said CEO Pat Gelsinger. “Customers are looking for a way to seamlessly extend their applications to the cloud and we are excited to extend these capabilities to the Japan market. More such deployments will follow, each tailored to suit the needs of key markets in Asia Pacific.”

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