OVH, a global hyper-scale cloud provider, intends to acquire the vCloud Air business from VMware, in a transaction that should be finalised this year.
vCloud Air is VMware’s cloud offering based on the software-driven data centre and is designed specifically to meet enterprise needs delivering a secure, hybrid cloud experience.
The recent introduction of bi-directional, zero downtime cloud migration and the hybrid DMZ architecture has enabled customers to accelerate the pace of migration to the cloud, while maintaining security, compliance and control. Since its inception, vCloud Air has serviced industry leading customers as they embrace a hybrid cloud environment.
VMware has evolved its business strategy to focus on providing hybrid and cross-cloud software and services, and is transitioning vCloud Air US and European data centres, customer operations, and customer success teams to OVH.
At the close of the acquisition, OVH will operate the service as vCloud Air Powered by OVH. It will continue to leverage VMware’s hybrid cloud technology, and will closely partner with VMware on go-to-market and customer support around the three vCloud Air use cases: data centre extension, data centre consolidation, and data centre recovery.
“We are pleased to announce this next step in vCloud Air’s evolution,” says Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. “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.”
OVH is one of the largest cloud service providers in the world with more than 1-million customers and 260 000 servers deployed.
A long-time VMware vCloud Air Network partner with more than 200 000 VMs from thousands of customers running VMware vSphere Private Cloud, OVH was recognised as “Service Provider of the Year” by VMware 2011-2014 and in 2016.
The two companies collaborated to bring Software-defined Data Centre (SDDC) as a Service to market in 2016.
“Through our strategic relationship with VMware, which includes joint R&D and best-in-class delivery of solutions, OVH leads the private cloud market in Europe,” says Octave Klaba, chairman and CEO of OVH. “With this acquisition, OVH will offer a very unique value proposition for larger enterprise deployments, including rich capabilities for migration and advanced hybrid functionalities for virtual data centres. This will benefit all our clients across the globe.”
