VMware and Microsoft Join Forces in Cloud
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, or so the saying goes. That appears to be what VMware is doing as it partnered up with once rival Microsoft. Last September, Microsoft released Azure Migrate to help transport private cloud VMware workloads to Microsoft’s public cloud.
This joint effort would not be happening if the public cloud market was not on the rise. According to Gartner’s forecasting, the global public cloud services market revenue was estimated to grow 18.5 percent last year; it is also estimated to grow more than $40 billion from 2016 to 2017.
Gartner projects 70 percent of public cloud services revenue to be dominated by the top 10 public cloud providers through 2021. "In the IaaS segment, Amazon, Microsoft and Alibaba have already taken strong positions in the market," said Mr. Nag. "In the SaaS and PaaS segments, we are seeing cloud's impact driving major software vendors such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft from on-premises, license-based software to cloud subscription models."
VMware was initially working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading public cloud supplier. Synergy Research estimates its market share is around 40 percent. Both VMW and AWS launched VMware Cloud on AWS in August 2017 with included management services like vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and vCenter.
"With VMware Cloud on AWS, a business can deploy a complete data center in a few hours," said Marco Alcala, CEO at Alcala Consulting.
Just one month later, Microsoft released its own public cloud strategy with Azure Migrate. Included in the package were tools acquired from Cloudyn earlier in summer 2017.
"Most of our customers who had Microsoft Exchange on premises have migrated to Office/365," added Alcala, whose firm is a VMware and Microsoft business partner, serving financial institution, restaurants and nonprofit organizations around America.
Azure Migrate is in test mode and its anticipated availability is Q1/Q2 2018.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
