SiliconANGLE is covering live the VMware press event where VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and Bill Fathers, SVP GM vCloud, unveiled VMware big push into the public cloud to counter both Openstack and Amazon AWS with a unique enterprise approach called vCloud Hybrid Service, an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud operated by VMware.

Bill Fathers SVP  and General Manager, Hybrid Cloud Services Business Unit reiterated Pat Gelsinger’s comments that IT is focused on the existing datacenter yet the demand from developers are driving the big push to migrate to the cloud.  The modern era for IT will require high amount of elasticity in public cloud but these apps and services must work with existing on premise in a data center.

Pat Gelsinger, theCube Alum and CEO of VMware, reiterated the companies vision around the fact that we moving into a modern era of Software-defined DataCenter (SDDC).

VMworld 2012 VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger with John Furrier

“VMware’s mission is to radically simplify IT and help customers transform their IT operations,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware. “Today, with the introduction of the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, we take a big step forward by coupling all the value of VMware virtualization and software-defined data center technologies with the speed and simplicity of a public cloud service that our customers desire.”

Additionally, Pat made reference to this new modern era in contrast to how it related to the past era of client server computing of which Pat Gelsinger and Paul Martiz have been leaders building.  “Now cloud delivered services are exploding on wide range of devices.  This is not just devices but apps and services (and Internet of things).   For IT it’s an opportunity get IT to break down the silos which are holding IT back from being more agile and more business focused” says Gelsinger.

Bill Fathers presented the vCloud Hybrid Service which will seamlessly extend VMware software used by hundreds of thousands of customers into the public cloud. This means customers will be able to extend the same skills, tools, networking and security models across both on-premise and off-premise environments.

For VMware customers they can get that seamless ability to run existing applications and building new applications that need to work back on premise in the data center.   This would be seamless connection from the data center to the cloud and back to the data center.  This is a real game changer for their clients according to VMware’s Fathers.

“As a source of competitive advantage for our International business, our Operations & IT department needs the agility and efficiency the public cloud promises,” said Julio Sobral, senior vice president, Business Operations, Fox.  “However, we don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch, we see in the vCloud Hybrid Service a potential solution to enable Fox International to have a more elastic platform that will support future deployments around the world. Working with technology partners like VMware gives us the best of both worlds by extending our existing infrastructure to realize the benefits of public cloud.”

Seamless networking and security are very powerful and if VMware can deliver what they say this might be the easiest hybrid public cloud on the market for medium to large scale enterprises.

Common management takes into account the trend of devops and use cases involving Puppet for provision with additional operations and business management for compliance support that large enterprises require.

According to VMware vCloud Hybrid Service is the fastest path to the cloud for VMware customers.  Specifically, VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will allow customers to extend their data centers to the cloud with:

• Application Neutrality

vCloud Hybrid Service will support the thousands of applications and more than 90 operating systems that are certified to run on vSphere so customers can get the same level of availability and performance running in the public cloud without changing or re-writing their applications.

• Seamless Networking and Security

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will allow customers to use virtual networking to securely extend existing Layer 2 or Layer 3 networks from their data center to the vCloud Hybrid Service.

• Business-Critical Reliability

Built on vSphere, vCloud Hybrid Service will offer automated replication, monitoring and high availability for business-critical applications, leveraging the advanced features of vSphere, including VMware vMotion, High Availability and vSphere Distributed Resources Scheduler.

• Simplified Management

vCloud Hybrid Service will offer a simplified approach to management, allowing customers to use the same tools and processes they use today to manage both on-premise and off-premise environments.  vSphere administrators will be able to view, manage and migrate VMs from the vSphere client using the free vCloud Connector plug-in.

One other small announcement that wasn’t amplified that was well received by folks in the audience was the focus on offering the IP and resources to the VMware ecosystem of partners and integrators.  If VMware can pull this “channel model” off then they can blow past Openstack and really compete with Amazon Web Services progress in the enterprise.

VMware will start with four owned data centers to power the vCloud and those data centers will be VMware powered.  VMware plans to expand their vCloud infrastructure by expanding with a mix of their own data centers and data centers from their partners.  This IaaS plan will be very important part of VMware’s ability to confidently deliver seamless sets of technology, apps, and services from the datacenter and cloud.

VMware believes their hybrid approach is what enterprises need.  Amazon of course see it differently and has scale in their favor.