Kathy Gibson reports from VMworld 2014 in Barcelona – We are entering the professional era of cloud computing, and the hybrid cloud is going to become the de facto IT infrastructure.
This is according to Bill Fathers, executive vice-president and GM: hybrid cloud at VMware, addressing the VMworld 2014 conference today.
In 2009, 2% of VMs were in the public cloud; in 2014, this has risen to 6% – which might not seem like a significant figure, Fathers says.
But there are some interesting trends hidden by those figures, he adds. There are four phases of cloud adoption, starting with experimental users, then the professional era drives huge new volumes of users.
The market is on the cusp of the experimental and professional phases, Fathers says, and there is expected to be a major uptake of cloud soon.
“There is a major transition occurring,” he says.
The problems that are holding companies back from moving to the professional phases include the fact that new cloud apps are general incompatible with the IT organisation.
“This means the experimental phase has been reactive, and difficult to manage.” Fathers says. Meanwhile lines of business become more independent in the cloud environment that are incompatible with the on-oremise environments.
“You actually have a hidden tax associated with the new apps. And you also create new silos.”
To break out of this scenario, Fathers says organisation need to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy that runs on a hybrid platform. In addition, it’s important for the IT professionals to be put back in charge of the hybrid platform.
“Since introducing VMware vCloud Air a year ago, VMware has made significant strides to provide customers with a hybrid cloud platform they know and trust,” says Fathers. “As we continue to expand VMware vCloud Air into new markets, with more services than ever before, we are only just scratching the surface of what the service will become the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for delivering innovation as a service from the data centre to the desktop and mobile applications.”
Data privacy, security and sovereignty continue to remain high on the list of customer concerns, even as IT organisations increasingly turn to public cloud to enable their business. The new vCloud Air location in Germany will help VMware’s European customers address local data privacy, security and sovereignty issues, while enabling them to take advantage of a public cloud from a global leader.
VMware also announced today an expanded early access program for VMware vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand – providing customers with on-demand access to vCloud Air with the swipe of a credit card. First introduced as a beta service at VMworld US 2014, VMware Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand will provide billing in arrears only for the services consumed. The early access program is expected to be available in North America and Europe in November 2014.
In addition, VMware is giving European customers more options on how to connect to and leverage the cloud with VMware vCloud Air Direct Connect. This allows customers to seamlessly expand their infrastructure directly to vCloud Air for increased resources and scale as needed over private dedicated networks, enabling secure, consistent, high bandwidth connectivity.
A little more than a year after introducing vCloud Air, VMware’s hybrid cloud platform has rapidly expanded its global footprint to provide businesses of all sizes with the fastest path to the hybrid cloud. Now with data centers in North America, Europe and Asia, VMware recently announced its hybrid cloud expansion in the Asia-Pacific region via a joint venture with SoftBank Telecom and SoftBank Commerce & Service that brought vCloud Air to Japan. In addition, VMware has announced a strategic partnership with China Telecom to build a world-class hybrid cloud service in Beijing.
Unlike other public cloud services, vCloud Air enables organizations to extend their private on-premises IT infrastructure seamlessly to the public cloud. The resulting hybrid cloud is compatible with customers’ existing applications and allows them to build new cloud-native applications, delivering agility and efficiency to the business in a secure, reliable and compliant manner. IT departments can view, manage and operate this “best of both worlds” cloud environment in a unified way using the VMware vSphere® platform they already know and trust.
With vCloud Air, channel partners play a key role integrating private data centres and public clouds and delivering hybrid solutions to customers. VMware vCloud Air was designed specifically with the channel community in mind. VMware distributors, solution providers and OEM partners sell vCloud Air the same way as any other VMware product.
In addition, VMware has an existing ecosystem of more than 2 100 vCloud Air Network Service Provider Partners in Europe that operate clouds based on VMware’s technology. Included within this ecosystem are over 160 VMware Hybrid Cloud Powered Service Providers offering true workload portability between the customer site and the cloud.
