LAS VEGAS – IBM and VMware are taking its relationship to yet another level.
The two companies are expanding on the major strategic partnership that was announced almost a year ago by giving IBM channel partners an easier way to sell VMware Cloud Foundation and other VMware cloud services. Partners now have the ability to be a “one-stop shop” for customers looking to extend VMware environments to the IBM Cloud.
Announced at IBM’s PartnerWorld Leadership Conference, the new deal cements the relationship the two companies began in 2016. That deal married together the infrastructure management capabilities of VMware product’s with IBM’s real estate to create a hybrid cloud infrastructure that should benefit both companies.
That solution is now being brought exclusively to IBM’s channel partners.
“IBM has been working with VMware for well over a year to develop hybrid cloud solutions. These solutions make it just as easy to run VMware workloads in the cloud as on-premises. By bringing in channel partners, customers have more flexibility as well as gaining access to more expertise. No other cloud service provider offers so many options for working with VMware,” said an IBM spokesperson in a statement to CDN.
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Since VMware Cloud Foundation and its other cloud services are running on the IBM cloud, channel partners are now able to automatically provision pre-configured VMware Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) environments. This automated platform integrates VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and SDDC Manager.
“There is a natural synergy between [IBM and VMware],” said Meg Swanson, vice president of marketing, Bluemix and developers at IBM when speaking with CDN. “Now the extension of this is to open it up to our IBM Business partners, so now they can do those migrations quickly for clients. ”
Additionally, IBM is the first VMware vCloud Air Network service provider to provide a VMware-based fully automated service for VMware Cloud Foundation.