Oracle and VMware Partner on Hybrid Cloud

VMware has added Oracle Cloud to the list of public cloud providers it partners with to enable customers to set up hybrid cloud environments that combine VMware infrastructure in their own data centers with public clouds.

The companies made the announcement at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco Monday. The deal follows similar announcements with Oracle Cloud’s largest rivals Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Partnerships between competing cloud and enterprise software giants have become increasingly commonplace, as the rivals recognize that many of the largest corporate clients want to use a variety of platforms that interoperate, including public clouds and on-premises environments. In another recent example, Oracle Cloud partnered with Microsoft Azure to make the two cloud platforms interoperable. 

For a cloud provider, partnering with VMware in this way is a big step forward in being able to capture revenue from the hybrid-cloud trend, given VMware's nearly ubiquitous presence in corporate data centers. Making it easier for customers to take advantage of cloud services without making big changes in their own data centers and without learning new infrastrucfture management tools should presumably accelerate growth for cloud providers. VMware and Oracle can be a powerful combination, because of how pervasive Oracle database technology is in the enterprise.

VMware partnership with AWS differs from the ones with Azure, Google, and Oracle in that VMware is the one managing and providing VMware Cloud on AWS services. In the three other cases, the cloud companies are the ones acting as providers.

As part of the partnership, Oracle will provide technical support for its software running in VMware, be it in Oracle-certified cloud environments or in customers’ own data centers.

Once the service is live – a VMware spokesman said the targeted availability date was in the first half of 2020 – customers will be able to run VMware Cloud Foundation, the data center software giant’s cloud infrastructure software stack, on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including the hypervisor vSphere, virtual network software NSX, and virtual storage software vSAN, VMware said in a statement.

VMware Cloud Foundation will run on bare-metal servers in Oracle’s cloud data centers, whose number is expected to grow quickly over the next 15 months. Oracle announced Monday a plan to greatly accelerate the rate of expansion of its global cloud platform. The company said it would add 20 cloud availability regions to the existing 16 before the end of next year.