Why VMware's Hybrid Cloud could be a Game Changer

There are a few reasons why VMware’s newly announced hybrid cloud offering could be a game changer for the industry: the most obvious is the common platform VMware customers will now have between their private cloud internal systems and this new VMware-operated public cloud.

On May 21, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud operated by VMware and built on its VMware vSphere, which is designed to give customers a common platform to seamlessly extend their data center to the cloud.

VMware is smoothing the path for customers to get to that “hybrid cloud nirvana” of having public and private cloud resources dynamically working together, according to Forrester (News - Alert) Research virtualization analyst David Bartoletti – which raises the question: Is VMware’s public cloud an Amazon killer?

“Absolutely not,” Gartner (News - Alert) analyst Chris Wolf told Network World. “It’s more of a VMware survival tool, allowing them to live another day.”

In fact, if VMware hadn’t made this move, the company would jeopardize its long-term success, Wolf added.

Although they both offer IaaS, Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) and VMware appear to be going after different customers. AWS offers developers a way to acquire cheap, fast access to virtual machines and storage. Meanwhile, VMware is going to attract infrastructure and virtualization folks. And the company has an advantage over AWS due to the common management platform.

“They can go to the infrastructure operators in IT shops and say, ‘Hey, all your management tools are right here,’” Bartoletti said.

Meanwhile, upon VMware’s hybrid cloud announcement, Gelsinger said the introduction service is a big step forward for the company by coupling the value of VMware virtualization and software-defined data center technologies with the “speed and simplicity” of a public cloud service.

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

But some experts maintain VMware is late to the IaaS game, and unlike its competitors, does not have massive data centers set up all over the world to host this new offering. As more details such as pricing and setup emerge, time will tell whether VMware’s hybrid cloud will really change the game at all.