When VMware announced it was partnering with AWS last fall, it turned more than a few enterprise heads. After all, we’re talking about one company that dominates virtual machines on-prem, and the other in the public cloud. Together, the two companies make a powerful combination — and VMware made the whole shebang official today at VMworld when it announced that VMware Cloud was live on AWS.
While AWS runs its own VMs, it’s not the same as those that VMware runs in a data center, and that creates a management headache for companies trying to run both. By letting companies move to AWS and continue to run the VMware VMs in the public cloud, they get the best of both worlds without the management problems.
It should be a boon to both companies, a fact that wasn’t lost on VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger or AWS CEO Andy Jassy. “VMware Cloud on AWS gives customers a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud that delivers the same architecture, capabilities and operational experience across both their vSphere-based on-premises environment and AWS,” Gelsinger said in a statement.
Jassy added, “The majority of the world’s enterprises have virtualized their data centers with VMware, and now these customers can easily move applications between their on-premises environments and AWS without having to purchase any new hardware, rewrite their applications, or modify their operations.”
All of this is good news for IT pros, who have struggled to make the two systems work together. That generally meant they would could put new applications in the cloud, but struggled to move legacy applications from VMware to the AWS VMs. That obstacle is removed with this alliance.
This partnership is a huge lift for VMware as a company. While they boast almost 100 percent penetration in on-prem data centers, the company has struggled over the last five years to find its place as customers began to shift workloads to the cloud. This gives them a way to integrate with AWS, the giant in the public cloud, and work smoothly across both environments.
As for AWS, it’s a case of the rich getting richer. It gets all of the public cloud business it was getting anyway, while also getting the VMware business as it moves to the cloud. Any way you slice it, this is a win-win-win. Both companies get a big boost, and so do the customers who get a product that makes it easier to integrate VMware VMs in the AWS cloud. Everybody gets a trophy.