In the 1999 sci-fi action thriller “The Matrix,” one of the lead characters confronts a choice between taking a red pill to learn a life-changing truth about the future or a blue pill that will keep him in blissful ignorance.

Google Cloud is extending the red pill/blue pill analogy to encompass a third option surrounding digital transformation and meeting customers no matter where on the IT journey they may be.

“For the longest time, the cloud was being presented as this false choice between the infrastructure of the past and the infrastructure of the future, like the blue pill and the red pill,” said Manoj Sharma (pictured), director of product management for Google Cloud at Alphabet Inc. “We’ve brought into this context the purple pill, which gives you the best of both.”

Sharma spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at VMware Explore, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Google Cloud has integrated its offerings with VMware Inc. and why this has resonated with enterprise customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Meeting need for availability

Within the context of Google Cloud’s approach to enterprise IT, the purple pill represents the provider’s ongoing partnerships with key industry players, including VMware. The two organizations have partnered on a variety of initiatives, such as VMware Engine, which is built on performant infrastructure with rapid provisioning and scale.

“We took a very unique approach with the VMware/Google Cloud engine,” Sharma said. “We wanted to make sure we met all the enterprise needs availability. We are the only service that gives four nines of service-level agreement in a single site.”

One of Google Cloud’s customers is Mitel Networks Corp., a Canadian provider of telecommunications services. Mitel needed to run a unified communications service with high-performance, low-latency infrastructure to deliver a reliable experience for customers. Google’s cloud-native enterprise platform and partnerships with infrastructure providers such as VMware helped Mitel create the solution it needed.

“Mitel was able to take advantage of that, being able to use the same platform that they were running in their co-located context and migrate more than 1,000 VMs in less than 90 days, something they weren’t able to do for over two years,” Sharma said. “We enable cloud integration; you get the same virtual private cloud experience in the global networking that Google Cloud has to offer. The VMware platform is fully integrated into that.”

Google Cloud’s partnership with VMware also includes services for containerized applications, leveraging Kubernetes and Anthos, Google’s hybrid cloud management platform.

“What we’ve enabled with Kubernetes and Anthos is the ability for a customer to run containerized infrastructure in the same consistent manner no matter what the platform,” Sharma said. “While Kubernetes runs on GKE, you can run using Anthos and the VMware platform, and you can run Anthos using any other cloud on the planet. We are letting customers get the full freedom of an advantage for what multicloud has to offer.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore:

(* Disclosure: Google Cloud sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Google Cloud nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE