Showing more confidence that its hybrid and multicloud strategies are finding favor with enterprise customers, VMware Inc. today is expanding both the functional and geographic scope of its services.

In particular, the company introduced a version of its Cloud Foundation migration product that runs natively on a hyperconverged hardware platform, which combines computing, storage and networking.

Having failed to crack the public cloud market with its own branded service, VMware has been focusing on becoming the provider-of-choice for customers looking to migrate from on-premises to hybrid and multicloud strategies, a path that Gartner expects three-quarters of enterprises to pursue by 2020.

VMware’s landmark partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. was a significant step in that direction, and the two companies have since tightened ties through a series of enhanced services and a partnership on Amazon’s first on-premises offering. VMware executives said more than 1,000 customers are running on its AWS services and the company has made it clear that it plans to run on every public cloud of any significance as well as the major on-premises cloud platforms.

“The debate about platform is long gone,” said Ajay Patel (pictured), VMware’s senior vice president of product development and cloud services. “It’s deploying wherever it makes sense.”

Today’s introduction of a version of VMware Cloud Foundation that runs natively on the Dell EMC VxRail hyper-converged platform is significant in that it marks the first hyperconverged appliance engineered from the ground up for VMware’s hybrid cloud infrastructure stack.

VMware executives said the integrated platform will be 60 percent faster than a standard software installation on the same hardware thanks to a set of jointly engineered features, lifecycle management and automation. The product, which will be available in April, will give customers a rapid onramp to VMware’s hybrid cloud, said Rick Villars, research vice president for data center and cloud at International Data Corp.

“Customers want a standard model of hardware and software that’s well-integrated with a shared cloud resource that they can consume in a cloud-like way,” Villars said. “They want short time-to-order, time-to-delivery, time-to-deployment and a consumption model that is similar to what they’re doing in cloud.”

VMware didn’t provide details on pricing, but Villars noted that the current trend is for hyperconverged platforms to be priced on a cloudlike utility basis. “Customers want more of a consumption-like model, and the first step is to have a standard product,” he said. “This is an important step along that path.”

CloudHealth gets healthier

Significant enhancements are also on the way for CloudHealth by VMware, the unified monitoring platform that VMware picked up with the acquisition of CloudHealth Technologies Inc. last summer. New features include enhanced multicloud reporting, multidimensional reporting, capacity management and integration with Wavefront, which is VMware’s cloud analytics and monitoring platform.

CloudHealth founder Joe Kinsella said the enhancements are a response to the increasingly decentralized manner in which cloud technology is being adopted within enterprises. “Today it’s not uncommon for enterprises to have an enormous number of public and private clouds,” he said. “That creates a substantial increase in complexity.”

The acquisition of CloudHealth has apparently met VMware’s objectives, according to figures the company released. CloudHealth is currently managing more than $8 billion in annual cloud spending for its customers and fielding nearly 4 billion application program interface calls per month.

Kinsella said the average customer saves about 25 percent in monthly costs through better visibility and automated recommendations. Integration with Wavefront should improve those results, he said. “You’ll see things like recommendations of how to move to different cloud environments,” Kinsella said.

Among new features in Cloud Foundation 3.7 are automated deployment of VMware’s Horizon 7 virtual desktop infrastructure, including the installation of application volumes, the user environment manager and a unified access gateway. Cloud Foundation is now available in AWS’s Central Canada, Paris and Singapore regions, bringing availability to 13 regions globally. The company counts 4,200 cloud partners, which is “a critical advantage for us,” Patel said.

The company also announced a new release of vCloud Director, its automated provisioning, management and data protection suite for cloud platforms. Release 9.7 provides centralized global cloud management, expanded scalability and an enhanced extensibility framework across both private and multitenant VMware clouds with unified monitoring and management.

Also being introduced is version 3.0 of vCloud Availability, a unified migration and disaster recovery service. It’s getting native integration with vCloud Director and a spiffed-up user interface.

Photo: SiliconANGLE