VMware Wants to Maximize Hybrid Cloud Choice for Customers but Coopetition will be a Key Challenge

Summary Bullets:

• VMware and Microsoft Azure are making speedy progress to commercialize their joint hybrid cloud offering, Azure VMware Solutions.

• Azure VMware Solutions forms part of VMware’s push to offer its customers a hybrid cloud option with all of the major cloud providers.

Amid the inundation of announcements and discussions at last week’s VMworld conference in San Francisco, one piece of news that received comparatively less coverage related to Azure VMware Solutions, a hybrid cloud offering from VMware and Microsoft Azure. Already generally available in some U.S. regions, it was revealed at VMworld that by Q1 2020 Azure VMware Solutions would be offered in eight global regions and would include Azure NetApp Files as an option for storage-intensive workloads.

Flexible Consumption Options for On-Premises IT Are Gaining in Popularity but Won’t Replace Traditional Approaches

C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

• Flexible solutions for consuming on-premises IT, including pay-per-use business models, vendor-managed private clouds, and flexible financing, continue to attract new customers and providers.
• Although they will complement, rather than replace, traditional approaches, portfolio expansion, new channel incentives, and efforts to target new markets will all fuel future growth.

Recent months have seen growing interest and investment in more flexible consumption solutions for on-premises IT, including pay-per-use offerings, vendor-managed private clouds, and flexible financing for on-premises IT investments. IT vendors ranging from HPE, Dell EMC, and Lenovo to IBM, Cisco, and NetApp are all looking to tap into what they see as growing enterprise demand for more flexible ways of consuming on-premises IT. Public cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Alibaba, are also honing in on this emerging need for more adaptable IT delivery and contracting models with managed (or easy-to-manage) on-premises versions of their platforms.