IBM Cloud senior vice president Robert LeBlanc and VMware president and chief operating officer Carl Eschenbach announced a strategic partnership to help companies easily extend their applications running on VMware’s software to the IBM Cloud at IBM’s InterConnect Conference on Monday, February 22, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nev. VMware’s technology is used by virtually every Fortune 100 company.

With nearly 100 percent of Fortune 100 customers utilizing VMware technologies, this partnership will help preserve and extend customer investments across thousands of data centers. Customers will be able to leverage VMware’s proven technologies with IBM’s growing footprint of 45 Cloud Data Centers worldwide, helping companies scale globally while avoiding retooling expenses, development risks and reducing security concerns.

IBM and VMware have jointly designed an architecture and cloud offering that will enable customers to automatically provision pre-configured VMware SDDC environments, consisting of VMware vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN on the IBM Cloud.

With this SDDC environment in place, customers will be able to deploy workloads in this hybrid cloud environment without modification, due to common security and networking models based on VMware.

IBM will utilize its extensive CloudBuilder tools and workload automation capabilities to automatically provision pre-configured or custom workloads to the cloud, validated by VMware's design patterns for Software Defined Data Center architectures.  In addition, VMware has extended vRealize Automation and vCenter management tools to deploy and manage environments on the IBM Cloud, as if they are part of a customer’s local data center. 

The two companies also will jointly market and sell new offerings for hybrid cloud deployments, including seamless workload migrations, disaster recovery, capacity expansion and data center consolidation.

“This partnership, an extension of our 14-year plus relationship with IBM, demonstrates a shared vision that will help enterprise customers more quickly and easily embrace the hybrid cloud,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware.  “Our customers will be able to efficiently and securely deploy their proven software-defined solutions with sophisticated workload automation to take advantage of the flexibility and cost effectiveness of IBM Cloud.”

"We are reaching a tipping point for cloud as the platform on which the vast majority of business will happen,” said Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president, IBM Cloud.  “The strategic partnership between IBM and VMware will enable clients to easily embrace the cloud while preserving their existing investments and creating new business opportunities.”

Additional key benefits for customers when the new offerings are available will include: 

• IBM and VMware will provide the expertise, solutions, and cloud infrastructure to help customers manage and scale their IT resources running in private and public clouds, utilizing the tools, processes and APIs with which customers are already familiar,
• Through sophisticated workload automation, clients will have the ability to quickly provision new or scale existing workloads to the IBM Cloud,
• Companies will have additional reach and scale to more easily start locally and scale globally with cloud capabilities, and also comply with data residency and other regulatory mandates,
• VMware customers will be able to use a flexible, monthly-based consumption pricing model that makes it more cost effective for users by enabling a simple pay-as-you-go option,
• The IBM Cloud will be a showcase platform in the VMware vCloud Air Network cloud provider ecosystem.

About VMware

VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility.  Built on VMware's industry-leading virtualization technology, our solutions deliver a brave new model of IT that is fluid, instant and more secure.  Customers can innovate faster by rapidly developing, automatically delivering and more safely consuming any application.  With 2015 revenues of $6.6 billion, VMware has more than 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners.  The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.