IBM Corp. and VMware Inc. took to the stage at the VMworld Europe 2017 conference in Barcelona today to reveal the fruits of a cloud computing partnership that began 18 months ago.

The two computing giants revealed their strategic partnership during IBM’s InterConnect Conference in February 2016, saying they were joining forces to help enterprises take better advantage of the cloud’s speed and economics. One of the industry’s biggest challenges, they said, was to help enterprises extend their existing VMware workloads from on-premises to the cloud, without having to redesign their existing applications and security policies.

Accelerating cloud adoption

At VMworld Europe, the two companies made a slew of announcements about how they’re doing that. The main idea, they said, is to help customers run VMware workloads in IBM’s cloud and take advantage of its artificial intelligence and data analytics capabilities.

To ensure everything works smoothly together, IBM said its cloud has adopted VMware’s HCX Technologies, which are designed to ensure interoperability and application mobility between the IBM Cloud and VMware-based clouds. HCX allows applications to be migrated with no downtime or refactoring necessary, meaning that customers can modernize their data centers while ensuring business continuity.

In addition, Big Blue said, it’s bringing VMware’s Horizon Cloud Service, which is a suite of virtual desktop and application cloud services, to the IBM Cloud. Customers will be able to choose between a fully-cloud hosted service managed by IBM, or a hybrid option that also runs on on-premises hyperconverged infrastructure, when the service becomes available in the fourth quarter.

Alongside these announcements, VMware said that the IBM Cloud is now VMware Cloud Verified. What this means is that IBM’s cloud has been certified by VMware as fueling business growth by driving innovation, improving efficiency and lowering costs for customers as they embark on their cloud transformation journeys.

“Enterprises in nearly every industry want to use the cloud to modernize and create new business opportunities,” said Faiyaz Shahpurwala, general manager for IBM Cloud.

Expanding alliances

Besides working together, IBM and VMware have also brought a number of new partners into the fold.

One of the companies they’re teaming up with is Germany-based information technology giant SAP SE. IBM said it’s making new SAP-certified bare metal servers available on the IBM Cloud. Targeted at customers running the SAP Hana in-memory database platform, the new offering is basically designed to provide more computing power for memory-intensive applications. The bare metal servers are powered by Intel Corp.’s latest Xeon Processors and provide up to 8TB of memory, IBM said, and have been certified by SAP to ensure optimal performance with SAP Hana.

True, hybrid clouds

A second new partner is British telecommunications provider Vodafone Group Plc., which is working with IBM to offer a new service supporting the migration of VMware workloads to a Vodafone Hosted Private Cloud from IBM’s cloud, and vice versa. Essentially what this means is that Vodafone’s cloud customers now have a second, hybrid option wherein they can shift their workloads to IBM’s cloud, thereby bringing applications and data closer to its customers. The service is made possible by VMware’s NSX network virtualization software, which serves as a kind of bridge between the two clouds, Vodafone said.

“IBM is an excellent partner for Vodafone,” said Vodafone’s director of cloud and hosting services Greg Hyttenrauch. “The combination of our network and our VMware-based Hosted Private Cloud with the global reach of IBM’s capabilities gives customers more flexibility, more choice and the possibility of a true hybrid cloud.”

Resale partnership

Finally, IBM said it’s working with Dell EMC to provide new VMware services to Dell customers on the IBM Cloud.

The alliance will see Dell EMC act as a reseller, offering VMware’s vCenter Server on IBM cloud to its customers. vCenter Server is a product that helps customers to extend the capacity of their on-premises data centers into the public cloud, so they can shift VMware workloads between the two environments as required.

“Customers will now be able to easily migrate enterprise applications to the single-tenant, IBM-hosted environment, and maintain the same level of control and visibility as if it were part of their own data center,” explained Armughan Ahmad, senior vice president and general manager of Hybrid Cloud and Ready Solutions at Dell EMC.

Dell EMC said it plans to begin reselling VMware’s solutions on IBM Cloud to its customers before the end of this year.

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