VMware Inc., provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, and IBM, global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, are announcing an expansion of their 20-plus year partnership with the aims of aiding global customers and partners modernize mission-critical workloads and accelerate time to value in hybrid cloud environments, according to the companies. The partnership expansion takes shape in IBM Consulting as a VMware GSI partner, as well as in jointly engineered solutions and development to add to their previous jointly developed technologies such as data encryption in motion and in use. With relevance spanning multiple industries such as financial services, healthcare, and the public sector, the ecosystem partnership invites solutions with reduced cost, complexity, and risk for cloud migration of mission-critical workloads.
“In today’s market, organizations want to modernize and transform operations quickly. But modernization and innovation cannot come at the cost of security and trust built with clients,” said Howard Boville, head of IBM cloud platform. “Together, IBM and VMware are delivering something by supporting our joint clients in regulated industries to more easily leverage hybrid cloud services securely—wherever and however they wish to run them.”
As demand for modernization of mission-critical workloads increases, IBM and VMware intend to accommodate. The partnership is a response to the desire for flexible yet affordable choices in digital transformation strategies and management—which is, indeed, a hefty task to tackle. Despite its heft, IBM and VMware have incorporated a variety of new approaches to their partnership to best assist their customers seeking modernization, including:
- IBM Consulting named Global Systems Integrator (GSI) for VMware, providing services to migrate, modernize, and manage customers’ workloads regardless of environment with security and openness in mind.
- Expansion of VMware and IBM Joint Innovation Fund, expanding the VMware Joint Innovation Lab’s pipeline for three more years with appropriate funding for joint product/solution development.
- Availability of IBM Cloud Satellite wherever VMware applications run, resulting in additional support for VMware workloads regardless of environment, increasing security and unified cloud services.
“With IBM and VMware, our customers get a combination of innovation and consulting experience based on decades of close collaboration and experience in meeting the business challenges of thousands of customers around the world,” said Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager of cloud infrastructure business group at VMware. “This collaboration will enable us to better streamline the user experience for our mutual enterprise customers looking to run VMware mission critical workloads that require higher levels of security, resiliency, and compliance in financial services and regulated industries.”
IBM highlights consistency as a key tool in aiding end users: consistent infrastructure, consistent operations, and consistent security. This sort of assurance is necessary for users who operate in hybrid environments, using IBM Cloud with a VMware stack. The enterprises emphasize the security of such hybridity, ensuring users that hybridity does not have to mean vulnerability. Highly compliant infrastructure is provided through this partnership, accelerating modernization and guiding the process with IBM Consulting. Particularly, when it comes to regulated and financial services customers who work both in the cloud and on-premises, financial services controls allows encryption of data in motion and in use that only they have the keys to; their data is accessible by them, and only them. Customers get the technological benefits of the cloud with added security and support, according to the enterprises.
For more information about this partnership expansion, please visit www.ibm.com or www.vmware.com.