VMware and IBM have announced the availability of what they claim is industry-first cloud services that enable organisations to quickly and easily move enterprise workloads to the cloud.
And, with more than 500 clients engaged, the global partnership between IBM and VMware is helping more organisations extend existing workloads to the cloud in hours, versus weeks or months.
Earlier this year, IBM and VMware set out to tackle one of the industry’s most pressing challenges: extending existing VMware workloads from on-premises environments to the cloud without incurring the cost and risk associated with retooling operations, re-architecting applications and re-designing security policies.

Since then, more than 500 mutual clients have begun moving their VMware environments to IBM Cloud including Marriott International, Clarient Global LLC and Monitise. IBM is a strategic cloud platform for VMware users with a growing footprint of nearly 50 highly-scalable and security-rich cloud data centres across the globe. With almost 100% of the Fortune 100 customers using VMware technologies, the partnership is designed to preserve and extend customer investments across thousands of data centers.
“Enterprises need fast and easy ways to deploy and move workloads between on-premises and public cloud environments,” says Robert LeBlanc, senior vice-president, IBM Cloud. “Our collaboration with VMware is becoming the glue for many organisations to scale and create new business opportunities while making the most of their existing IT investments in a hybrid cloud environment.”

The introduction of VMware Cloud Foundation combines VMware’s market-leading compute, storage and network virtualisation solutions into an integrated platform. For the first time, organisations can now automatically provision pre-configured VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) environments on IBM Cloud in hours versus weeks or months. The platform integrates VMware vSphere, VMware Virtual SAN, VMware NSX and VMware SDDC Manager, and gives customers broad choice in their infrastructure decisions.
In addition to new services, IBM is training more than 4 000 service professionals with the expertise required to provide clients with VMware solutions. This expansive team of sellers and advisers will provide clients with the expertise to extend VMware environments to the cloud.
“IBM and VMware share a common vision for providing customers with an easy path from the data centre to the cloud,” says Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. “This collaboration has been so successful that we’re investing more deeply so our customers can quickly deploy software-defined solutions in just hours to IBM Cloud with all the sophisticated workload automation they have within their own data centres.”