‘Powerful’ Partnership
The alliance is a “very powerful collaboration” that gives companies flexibility in deciding whether to transition their data to the public cloud while maintaining investments they’ve made in on-premise data centers, said Tim Feeney, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. “Essentially, the process of managing the hybrid cloud environment is significantly less of a hassle now,” Feeney said. “This is a very powerful move for VMware because IT managers are more likely to retain VMware’s services for longer.” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said he sees hybrid solutions providing business opportunities for decades into the future while the on-premise data business slows. The Amazon partnership could be a blow to International Business Machines Corp., which has its own deal with VMware. IBM, however, said in a statement that 1,000 clients are already using the IBM cloud with software from VMware and the partnership has created “significant momentum.” Microsoft, responding to the Amazon-VMware agreement, said AWS is behind in offering hybrid cloud solutions. “Microsoft Azure has always been hybrid by design, based on our decades of enterprise experience,” the company said in the statement. “True hybrid cloud isn’t just connectivity, it’s consistency — across development, management, and security.” Global public cloud spending is expected to hit $204 billion this year, up 16.5 percent from a year ago, according to researcher Gartner Inc.