While IBM Corp. and VMware Inc. have been partners for more than 10 years, they continue to evolve their partnership in cloud computing and mobility. At the recent VMworld event in Las Vegas, IBM Cloud announced the limited availability of VMware vCloud for vCloud Director, a consumption-based disaster recovery solution that enables organization to utilize their existing VMware tooling and extend their workloads to the IBM Cloud to access new features and capabilities, including artificial intelligence, blockchain, and internet of things.

Because IBM runs several data centers for VMware Inc. clients, both companies have mutual customers. Therefore, combining strategies around cloud seemed “kind of natural,” according to Don Boulia (pictured), general manager of cloud developer services at IBM. Many of these companies are asking for new features and capabilities as they move to the cloud. One such company is American Airlines.

“They started off looking at digitizing what they were doing with modern applications and realized they really needed to move some of those existing workloads out to the cloud as well,” according to Boulia, who added the company did so by using VMware and cloud-native services.

Boulia spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), during the VMworld conference. They discussed IBM and VMware technologies that have developed in their partnership, as well as data migration technologies. (* Disclosure below.)

A bridge to the cloud

Boulia’s job is to move workloads to the cloud, from two angles: First, there is enterprise-out technology, which includes VMware. Enterprise-out technology is an existing footprint that customers want to gain leverage on as they move to the cloud, Boulia explained. The goal moving forward is to integrate enterprise-out technology with the second angle: cloud-in-use technology.

Additionally, VMware and IBM are working to improve and expand the “4.0 technologies” that attracted customers to IBM Cloud in the first place: AI, blockchain and IoT, to name a few examples. Over the past two years the partnership has produced 1,700 mutual customers, according to Boulia. They focus on migration and VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension, which gets a workload out to a cloud environment from an on-premises data center, he explained.

Unique to the VMware and IBM partnership is a cloud disaster recovery solution. It allows clients to do disaster recovery directly from the IBM Cloud. Much of what IBM has been working on is solutions that are “key for people to be able to move out into those kinds of environments, things like the DR solutions and the backup solutions,” Boulia said. Another example is what they call “the garage” methodology. Essentially, customers have a large set of tools, IBM and VMware, but they also need to have the skills to use those tools and a way for those skills to then be applied, Boulia explained. Design thinking, MVPs, and agile practice are just a few of the skills IBM uses to plan out this methodology.

“We tend to get the business and the technical teams together for that; that’s typically the most effective,” Boulia said.

Since most things, even containers, run on a virtualized infrastructure, IBM has created a container service based off Kubernetes that will help bridge the virtualized infrastructure and the cloud world. The dial of services offered runs from full-shared multi-tenant, where everything is run and maintained by IBM, to bare metal, where each company has full control over everything they do.

As these technologies were created for certain internal enterprises, IBM and VMware realized that these were tools other companies would eventually need and ask for, so they publicized the technology. “Ultimately, I think the partnership gives us the ability to both bring people from where they are and put them in the next generation as well,” Boulia concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: Hitachi Vantara Corp sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. Hitachi Vantara, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE