Report: VMware, AWS Mulling Joint Data Center Software Product

Amazon Web Services and VMware are in talks about potentially teaming up on developing a data center software product, The Information reported, citing anonymous sources.

No details about what that product would be are available at this point, but VMware’s value for AWS is its enormous enterprise data center install base, while helping customers create and run environments that combine their on-premises data centers with one or multiple public cloud providers is currently the big business focus for VMware. Its VP John Gilmartin told us that much in a recent interview for The Data Center Podcast.

 
All that makes it very likely that the product being discussed would focus on hybrid cloud capabilities. The two companies already have a partnership in place, announced last year, whose goal has been to help enterprises easily integrate their existing VMware environments with AWS. Under that partnership, VMware will essentially sell a set of tools that will enable its customers to manage AWS the same way they manage VMware on-premises. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said at the time that this would be “the primary public cloud offering of VMware.”

Last year’s announcement was one of the rare acknowledgements by AWS that hybrid cloud is the preferred way forward for most enterprise IT shops. Its messaging has traditionally treated hybrid cloud as a stepping stone in transition to an all-cloud infrastructure.

Read more: Amazon Wants to Replace the Enterprise Data Center

Microsoft’s hybrid cloud strategy now rests on Azure Stack, its on-premises software stack that integrates with its public cloud and gives users some public cloud-like features in their own data centers. The product started shipping just this month.

Read more: Here’s How Azure Stack Will Integrate Into Your Data Center

Google’s boldest move in the area to date has been its recently announced partnership with Nutanix, one of the hottest hyperconverged infrastructure vendors in the market. The partners promise customers an easy way to “fuse” their on-premises Nutanix infrastructure with Google Cloud Platform.